#or its probably more common in those that have had bad experiences with humans in the past and are more cautious

[saturnniidae]

Thinking about my 'Nadders being able to mimick human speech like parrots' concept again but with a slightly darker take on it?

Deadly Nadders are a fiercely loyal species and are social, so what if when they perceive a threat to their flock they gradually learn to lure people away using human voices (likely the sounds of children or people calling for help) to either A) if you're lucky, just get tricked into walking to the edge of the forest/area so you don't find them, or B) get lost in the woods so the Nadder can spineshot you out of sight.

I also think Changewings could do something similar considering their gaze is hypnotic (in the comics didn't Hiccup get hypnotized by one and almost walked off a cliff?)

[littledigits]

thoughts on the cut episodes and ppls reactions 'n stuff

Since it was confirmed that a few more episodes of Hilda were written but cut, I do think the reaction of people finding this out is really interesting and not just because its fairly common in the industry and isint a sign of anything bad necessarily. I mean heck, in a weird way being behind the scenes and then seeing how people interpret things, what they take as important, what they think is a thread…all of that is interesting. When your job is basically trying to get people to pick up what you're putting down storywise its kind of a neat topic, because everyone communicates in their own way.

BTW before I keep going this is not a post to say dont crit/vent/complain/whatever about whatever the heck you want in hilda or any media, you do you. I think peoples honest takes are fascinating (said in victoria van gale voice) and even just people speaking their mind shows that they are interested and they care so that matters. Also not one singular post triggered this, its just been on my mind as I surface level read things so no stressies.

When It comes to the cut episodes, I'm seeing some people assume that whatever was cut would have fixed some of the crits they may have had about the season..and who knows, maybe yes? But I'd say ultimately probably not. Not because they dont include things that people want to see, or may have some topics people want expanded on ..but because thats just impossible in the grand scheme of things.

I mean this applies to shows in general, not just hilda. Every person who watches a show has their own idea of what the show represents to them. For some of its more of the surface events or characters where as others connect it with a deeper emotion. A lot of people respond to different tones of the episodes, which there are many. Some people prefer the one off adventures that stand alone as their own stories and others want to see more of a stronger through line. Some may see a new character and expect a new arc and thread, while others wonder why we couldn't've used a previously introduced character. Some may read between the lines more and others may take what is presented as very straight forward and literal …and no one is WRONG, because our big wrinkly brain meats all have their own tastes and ways of imputing information.

Television animation is rife with factors that actually futz with the quality and ability of the team to make a beautiful, amazing product like EVERY DAY. The script process and what goes into production is just one. The team is made up of many creatives all with their own varied experiences and voices just like the audience. In order for people to have their own voices and say, you are going to end up with some things that hit better then others, especially if the team is allowed to grow and experiment and play a little. Hilda has always been a show where we've been able to have a lot of creative say, and i think that sincerity comes through ! but with the sincerity and that humanity, it also means that there are going to be things that arnt going to make sense in the grand scheme of things lol. Even the writers and creators and producers have differing opinions on what to explore and dive into, probably more so then fandoms haha. Having more episodes may scratch some itches but not all, HECK, those episodes being cut could have re-allocated resources to other areas that helped elevate your fav ep of the season ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ who knows! Schrodinger's episodes! (also ngl I was having cold sweats over the scope of some of them as cool as they were. The season may have been shorter but it was intense..it takes a long time to do stuff that looks that clean and crisp)

Imperfect art is very human! Do the best you can at the time with the factors you have. I was given so much trust and freedom on my episodes, and I was just happy to do something fun that allowed me and my team to grow and learn. I was fucking STOKED to get a one off story because it was way less pressure for me to take my next step directing cuz just doing the thing is a feat. Any sincerity you feel cant come through if that means we're afraid that we cant make mistakes, or do a story choice ppl wont vibe with. All you can do is do the best you can, see if people are picking up what you're putting down, and grow from it for next time.

Anyway, just a thought ramble. Its not to say do or dont do this or think this way blah blah. I just love that storytelling is messy and complex and everyones gonna take it a lil differently, especially if you have a team where you allow lots of voices to have input. It is all just a big experiment to see if people leave with a particular experience by putting your resources into the things you have that matter, and try you best to distract from burnt edges or patched up holes that happened throughout the process of making the dang thing lol.

[spidermilkshake]

Until September

More RE fanfics--more mutants, more corporate shenanigans. There is fluff! Also a rival company commando is blitzed by a Tyrant, but, uh, this is Resident Evil. Even the nicest scenes are bookended by scary.

Rating: Teen (TW for suggestive language, human experimentation, dehumanization, medical/lab settings and stuff, plus also human adults cuss like human adults, some obvious child neglect and endangerment, alcohol abuse, implied animal abuse)

Mr. X's long first assignment--to be upper-level Tyrant Project researcher Dr. Julian Ramirez's personal bodyguard as he spends his summer at his fancy house bought with his evil corporation money. Having a test mission prototype Tyrant on your property to help flatten any intruders or rival company agents that sneak in is apparently a common perk if the company's board likes your work. Ramirez, uh, has an interesting home life, and T-00 is smart enough to detect some of that despite this being its first experience of humans not poking it in a lab or putting it through combat training in a top-secret facility...

5: Until September

            From that point, after a short cargo helicopter ride and another in the back of a large civilian armored car, T-00… “Mr. X”… experienced the brief life of Dr. Ramirez’s at-home lab.

            Situated in a cozy, deep-red corner of northern California, the man had the benefit of the rural landscape for all manner of reasons. One being his bunker laboratory which he fiddled around with variants of common viral and bacterial elements within, as well as examining various domesticated animal species’ genomes to try and discover another, more advantageous quirk that could be added to the Tyrant project. Some of the sources of these genomes could be found on the small attached ranch property in the form of a somewhat decrepit horse and several large, semi-feral cattle. A highly-pampered golden retriever mix also bounced its way around the property, but it could hardly be lumped in with the farm animals considering how loving and attentive Dr. Ramirez seemed to become on sight of the canine. This animal was about as untrained as the cows—though it balked at any close quarters with the Tyrant, probably smelling something was off about the inoffensive but intimidating newcomer.

            The Tyrant was ushered swiftly into a portion of the swanky abode which bordered the laundry and a small guest room on the first day. Between these two locations, the doctor had prepared a simple rest area for the bioweapon to reside in while it was not to be seen—roughly the size of the small laundry though without the obstructing machines, T-00 noted the heavily-built twin bedframe and the fitting mattress, which it assumed it was meant to rest on. It… was not bad, now that it had a few minutes to contemplate it.

            Okay, it was more than “not bad”. Mattresses were invented for a reason, and the insufficient nature of those holding chamber benches became richly obvious to the beast that had never experienced proper back support before. It had slept a solid nine hours the first night, until summoned by a cheerful call of its nickname—the longest stint of sleep it had ever known.

            Otherwise, the Tyrant which Dr. Ramirez called “Mr. X” stayed a moment, or a meter or two, behind him (depending on what the man requested, and what the Tyrant’s highly-tuned senses for danger dictated). The man spent a lot of time in the small bunker lab, checking fuse banks before booting up huge computers to run an equally massive hypermicroscope device in order to manipulate pieces of dead SARS and Hepatitis delta-virus, picking out segments of RNA and comparing them to Umbrella’s sample slides of base genes. He often made spunky commentary, knowing it was only the so-far nonverbal Tyrant hearing him, but based on his specific, jovial responses it knew he could only be speaking only to it.

            Despite the doctor’s fancy and frequent social life, he was very lonely. After dark fell, no other human occupied the languidly-spread and draftily large house in the hills. The man still chatted happily—sometimes too happily—with his newly-won bioweapon attendant.

            The bioweapon had once or twice also stepped out with him, and a very flinchy, nervous man whom the doctor’d called a “trainer”, to see the old horse and the half-dozen cows. T-00 eyed the dusty, vacantly-staring creatures staying well back from the bioweapon. They behaved much like B.O.W.s with none or very rusty training. The lone horse would come right to the gate for Dr. Ramirez’s trainer, even with the towering creature feet away, though the whites of its eyes flared plainly as it stood, ears pinning and legs shaking for the trainer to check its hooves and teeth.

            T-00 focused instead on the cows, not wishing to interfere unintentionally on the equine check-over. It locked eyes with a large, rusty-brown beast that had very small, stubby horns. The animal stamped its rear legs softly, nostrils flaring. Strange. The creature was fairly small compared to the others in the group, though it placed itself front and center regardless—a “leader” of sorts, making all of the protective motions towards the others that the position entailed. A much larger steer of a mostly black color hid ineffectually behind her—sharing many features with this cow.

            “Come on! We’re done Mr. X,” the doctor called from the gate, the first indication it had quietly shuffled a step inside the paddock area to watch the animals more closely. With an instinctual start, it turned and tromped off after its current objective.

            It wished the animals and its master’s use of the Tyrant as a social interaction stand-in had been the most predictable parts of its mission. No—that honor would go to the once-monthly incident of rival agents attempting to gain access to Ramirez’s nuclear-shielded bunker. Irritated out of its comfortable rest, the Tyrant followed the clinking and ticking of attempts to bypass the lock code and the other measures to find a body-armored individual in front of the small cellar entrance, like a sitting duck as they focused on the loud—annoying—puzzle portion. It wasn’t clear if they ever realized an eight-foot mutant weapon was creeping up on them before it happened. Regardless, Ramirez would have one of the informed Umbrella staff bag up the body and tote it off the next morning as the household came awake.

--------

            It was one week during the hellishly dry heat of summer than Mr. X encountered a true challenge to its adaptable wits—and it began more or less during one of the more predictable, boring parts of its duties. The bioweapon lurked a few meters behind the doctor in his home office, blocking the large window with its even larger back while Ramirez was distracted on the phone.

            The Tyrant could only guess at some of this, but it did recognize the codenames and designations used for various B.O.W.s:

            “So the train was just…? All of them?” Julian Ramirez scrubbed at his patchy stubble, “Jesus… Well, do you know how it happened? …Uh huh, I’m sure it came back inconclusive. There’s never any hypercompetitive, jealous pricks trying to off each other at Umbrella labs, huh.”

            “Speaking of, do you have any idea what they’re gonna do about Birkin?” There was a long pause before a tinny squeak of the other voice picked up, “Oh come on. They practically know it was him. Who else has been sabotaging projects involving T for months? …It was T on that train, right? …Okay, they even know it’s that strain—so who else has access to the Arklay lab who would?”

            There was an even longer silence this time before the other line began to speak again; and once it did Ramirez’s grip on the phone tightened, his dark complexion going sweaty and almost impossibly pale. The change was so extreme that T-00’s senses honed in and it watched its master with mounting concern, convinced the doctor was about to collapse out of some kind of medical distress.

            “… Since when? …Really, that recent?” He finally dredged up his voice again, wiping furiously at his brows and mustache, staring down at his own shaking hand in bafflement as if wondering who put all of that sweat there, “So where was Willy in all this?”

            “…Ah.”

            “So… they’re sure it wasn’t him… Well. I’ll see about giving Teifer a call soon if she’s got questions for me.”

            After Ramirez hung up, he glanced over his shoulder at his house-Tyrant with an indecipherable expression, which had Mr. X straightening up to full attention. Then, with a heavy sigh he turned in his chair towards the squat glass bottle of Pilár dark rum that he kept on one side of the desk and unscrewed the cap in a ritual which usually—T-00 had observed—took place later in the day. The powerful alcohol swirled into a coffee mug and shortly after was slammed into the man’s mouth, eliciting a rough grunt as he fought the burn of the unhealthily-large shot.

            Mr. X relaxed somewhat as Ramirez returned to the phone. The next conversation had more that the bioweapon recognized, but was even more confusing:

            “Hey, Teifer! It’s Ramirez,” he sounded as peppy as always, despite the haggard look in his eyes and the rum flooding into his bloodstream, “Yeah, he told me you needed to hear from me… eh? Ah, he did mention what happened up at the Arklay lab…”

            He leaned back, hooded eyes inspecting his propped-up shoes as he took in his colleague’s words. He rolled them upon a certain part of her story:

            “Hey, hey—you’re getting too stressed. Listen: I get the risk. But Cerberus specimens physically can’t spread the virus. That shouldn’t be your main concern.

            “Those dogs don’t have T in them anymore—they’re kinda like the modern Tyrants, alright? We enhance the genome, we infect—with the delta strain for the Cerberus—and let the mutation take its course, okay? Then when they’re fully baked, we quarantine the specimens, give them a T-virus vaccination, and a course of anti-retrovirals just to be sure before those guys go to training. Which, by the way, you should be able to get a hold of someone at N.E.S.T. with experience training animal B.O.W.s. They’ve got lots of new Hunters coming out of there, they can help you wrangle those dogs when the time comes…”

            “Hm? …Ah… Yeah, see, that one is a problem,” Ramirez’s shoulders finally slouched more naturally, and he got a level, if slightly slushy, tone of voice back, “Rabies is very real and a good explanation for any ‘public eye’ stuff… If the bear story is true you’ll want to get a squad with heavy weapons and track down every rabid animal claim in a five-mile radius, then be sure to bag and burn everything they shoot.”

            “..? Teifer, you know that’s even easier. Quarantine and trace identity, burn the premises, then let the weaponized-virals R&D team see the data.”

            “…What journalist?” At this new turn in the conversation Ramirez shot upright in his chair, “… You don’t have a name? …Uh-huh. … Hm. Well, if he knows too much he probably already knows he’s dead.”

            “Right. See you in fall. Bye now.”

            After Ramirez hung up, he sat for a long while, head in hands. Mr. X let a good ten minutes pass before the alarm bells started to go off, and the huge mutant huffed as it took a careful step forward. At the creak of the floors, Dr. Ramirez raised his head again.

            “Eh?” He twisted around, “What is it, Mr. X?”

            The bioweapon had a number of words that it might have wanted to put out—“Are you well?”, “What was that about?”, “Do you need help?”, or even “What the fuck?”—but it had no idea how to move its throat, or tongue, or lips to do such a thing. He did the next best thing: Mr. X grunted, managing to make the trailing end of the noise rise up in pitch with wordless questions, as humans did in such a situation.

            “Smart fella,” Ramirez gave a soft laugh. “One of these days I’ll have to get you practice in saying a few words. I’m fine. Can you just… turn and check out the window for a while? I have to call my ex,” he added the last part quickly, which while confusing did not hold up the Tyrant very long in turning around and scanning the exterior of the house for potential threats.

            The phone rang several times, with Ramirez left waiting. Mr. X’s pinprick pupils hovered over the entrance gate, then the edge of the pinyon treeline, then over to where the dog was laid out in a patch of dirt by one of the front garden walls. Finally, someone answered the doctor:

            “Linda… hey. No don’t—” there was an insistent buzz of muffled vocals from the speaker, “It’s about the weekend, Linda—look, you want me to just not warn you? Huh?”

            “Okay okay. Look, I just need you to know I have to be out a few hours Saturday to work with someone. Don’t worry—” he interrupted the agonized screech from the speaker, “—I have someone to watch her until I get back. Don’t worry. I wouldn’t walk back on this, mi amor.”

            “… Okay, Jesus, I won’t do it again. Just… noon Saturday, right? I’ll be there.”

            The phone slammed on the receiver. Mr. X peeked back over his lapels in anticipation of a command. There was only so much time in the office, however decorated and airy, that Ramirez could stand and Mr. X tended to agree with this habit. It was in the loft area of the house, and the ceilings were a foot too low for the Tyrant’s comfort.

            “Right. Mr. X?” The bioweapon swiveled around in reply, “I’m going to fetch some things from the basement. Take up a guard downstairs, yeah?”

            Mr. X nodded with eagerness, letting the somewhat tipsy human lead the way out the door and down the stairs. This was an ideal task for both of them, considering the ninety-plus temperatures outside, and once the man had vanished down the too-narrow steps to the musty, refreshingly cool basement level the Tyrant posted himself in a comfortable nook within sight of the open basement door, the front door, and the downstairs hall towards the kitchen area. It watched. Nothing much reached its eyes or ears—except for a distant snort of a horse or cow, a wasp bouncing against the nearest window in a frenzy to find food or shade, and a clatter followed by a Spanish-language curse from the cluttered sublevel. Business as usual.

-------

            On Saturday, the omen which Mr. X innocently overheard came to the doorstep.

            In the morning, with Ramirez nursing a pickle-juice-based hangover cocktail and holding a hardboiled egg like it was a sergeant’s switch from bygone days, Mr. X was confronted with a series of warnings which it knew right away were serious, very serious, and urgent… but that he didn’t entirely grasp right away.

            “Mr. X! Listen—listen,” the man pressed his eggless hand into the lapel of his tame mutant’s trenchcoat, “Today is going to be a bit different. I need you to be… uh… well… different.”

            T-00 stared down at the man pressing himself as close to its face as possible, and gave a low grunt as he tilted his head.

            “Well, I mean…” Ramirez let up on the contact, as aware as they came that pushing the living weapons too hard or confusing them with contradictory orders could come with serious consequences, “Mr. X, you are going to meet my daughter today. She’s visiting over the weekend and will be here until roughly 11 a.m. on Monday.”

            Ramirez waited, as if to hear an acknowledgement from the creature staring him down with wide, perplexed, but still willing eyes. The man sighed, leaning into his hands which had settled on the Tyrant’s chest, “While she’s here, I want you to put your protective orders over me as secondary. While she’s here, you protect her, is that understood?”

            Daughter. Mr. X had not heard anything of Ramirez’s family before, but it had an intuitive sense of what the word “DAUGHTER” meant. The creature took a deep, sharp inhale, then gave a rough, affirmative growl at the same time it bobbed its head.

            “Good… good…” Ramirez reached up and patted the Tyrant on the shoulder, grin of relief almost palpable without flashing it within sight. Mr. X reflexively swelled with the praise.

            “She’ll be here at noon, and you must watch over her very closely until about four. If she needs water, get her a cup and fill it from the fridge. If she gets hungry, take her to the bottom left cabinet and she’ll pick what she wants. Otherwise just make sure no one and nothing hurts her. I’ll introduce you—”

            —and then, the kitchen phone rang, and the pager on the doctor’s hip bleeped with an annoying tone. The man rounded and went to answer, while the biomutant stood silently processing the future orders. Daughter… did that mean juvenile or adult daughter? Probably… juvenile. It would not need to be providing water on demand to an adult, or show an adult to the bottom left cabinet. There was also no reason to limit an adult to that particular cabinet, which only contained the sacks of undiluted nutrient gel for its own fluid intake along with boxes of crackers, jars of peanut butter, and a few bags of veggie chips and other “health snacks” as the doctor had called them. It was… not exactly designed for the task of childcare, and it shuffled anxiously in place as it dawned on him that it would have to figure it out with no more instruction. It could… learn this… right?

            Humans seemed to be fairly unbothered by the duty to watch over their offspring—so it must not be that difficult.

------

            Mr. X had been ordered to stand still inside the gates of the garden in an area half-concealed with shade when the large sedan pulled into the gravel circle at the end of the rural mountain road and crunched to a stop. Its keen vision spotted the small figure step out of the passenger side and quickly have an arm snatched up in a control grip by the small woman who had emerged from the driver’s side. There was a bitter argument between all three, which quelled after a minute or two while the sedan’s engine puttered impatiently. The woman released the little one, who did not run to either parent and instead stepped towards the gate, keeping her large brown eyes on both of them, as if wary of them following her.

            After a minute the car’s engine revved up as it returned down the uneven paving, disappearing in a few seconds around a bend. Ramirez was left wearily standing by where it had once parked, a small bag dangling from one hand (presumably the belongings of his child, packed into a tiny, colorful package).

            Mr. X glanced down at a small sound and was suddenly locking eyes with the absolute tiniest human he had ever seen. Dark hair and cut short, dark skin with a few freckles, and those huge brown eyes which widened further upon noticing the massive, trenchcoat-clad form skulking just inside the property line.

            “Papá!” The shrill voice was at such decibels and pitch that the Tyrant was forced to stagger back. Such a tiny body was so, so loud! The bioweapon resisted the urge to raise up its hands to cup over its ears, but its knees did bend and buckle before the doctor rushed up and grabbed the girl around the shoulders:

            “What’s wrong, m’ija?”

            “M-monstruo!” She pointed straight to the half-subdued, heavily-stressed visage of the startled Tyrant.

            “Oh,” Ramirez hugged his daughter closer and chuckled, as if there was some clear, and obvious, and worse trivial confusion at play. He knelt to where he was halfway between his child and his personal Bio-Organic Weapon.

            “It’s okay, m’ija—this is my bodyguard. I promise, he’s nice, okay?”

            The child peeked over the shabby fabric of Ramirez’s polo shirt, meeting the obviously inhuman pupils of the giant form that had frightened her. Without telepathy, it was unknown if she found a lack of evil within, but she did relent and sniffle up the start of her tears.

            “Bodyguard?”

            “Sí, for work,” Ramirez gave a strained smile, “It’s okay, he won’t hurt you. Look, see? He didn’t mean to scare you.”

            The doctor had slightly pressed the girl further around his shoulder, closer to the colossal form. Mr. X sensed the girl’s resistance to this and took a step slightly back—almost mirroring her trying to push herself back away from it. Its hearts thudded stronger in a sympathetic feedback loop upon seeing the feeble struggle she was putting up against her own father. He was forcing her towards a powerful monster, knowing full well what it could do. What then could it do, a being built for combat?

            It did what only its inbuilt reflexes urged it to do—and bowed its head until it lost eye contact with either of them. Mr. X had assumed Dr. Ramirez’s child would know what a T-103 was. It was now clear that she did not know at all what he was; she might think it was a human. But a big human staring hard at a tiny child was… threatening.

            “You’re okay. C’mon let me introduce you!” Ramirez’s voice chimed out as if no terror or stress was in evidence, “This fella is Mr. X. Don’t ask his real name—it’s secret. He’ll keep you safe so long as you’re here.

            “Mr. X! Eyes up.”

            T-00 reluctantly obeyed, and the first thing its eyes met was the petrified face of the girl still trying to cling onto her father’s shoulder after he’d pushed her to be well within the bioweapon’s reach. Its back twitched before it forced itself to stay completely still, the only other movement he made the uneasy blinking, and the gaze flicking back and forth—from the man, to the girl, to the man.

            “Mr. X, this is my daughter, Mariposa.” He smiled, “You remember I was talking about her yesterday, yeah? Be nice to her. She’s only—how old are you, Mari?”

            Was it… normal for humans to lose track of how old their offspring were? Mr. X felt his brows twitch, and somehow this microscopic expression which went in opposition of her father’s constant push was what Mariposa needed to see to give a quick swallow of nerves and relax a fraction:

            “Ten.”

            “That’s my girl! C’mon now, let’s get your stuff inside,” Ramirez stood up, all but shrugging his little girl off of himself like an annoying weight and picking up the backpack from where he’d set it down beside him. Apparently only Mr. X heard the soft whimper she let out as she stumbled and scurried to put her father back between herself and the menacing giant; T-00 took the opportunity to also do away with this forced close-quarters and took a much larger step back. It hesitated to follow the two into the front door for a few moments, especially as it spied the child sneaking worried glances over her hardly-evident shoulders at the creature.

            “Mr. X! Come on you, get out of the heat!” Its eye twitched a bit at the impatient tone of the order, but ducked his head low to negotiate the entryway and squeezed into the welcome air conditioning. Ramirez had been rushing around the open concept downstairs, dropping off Mariposa’s belongings onto one of the kitchen chairs before scoping around for his own briefcase, wallet, and the keys to his armored truck. The girl meanwhile had posted herself up behind the kitchen island, staring over bewildered and clearly scared at her parent preparing to leave her alone with a monster.

            “Right… that should be it. M’ija, come give a kiss ‘bye for now—Papá’s got to go into town for some last-minute business.”

            “You can’t leave me with—”

            “Shh! Don’t be rude. Mr. X is a big teddy bear, really—relax!”

            The Tyrant itself shot the doctor a dubious look; bear was maybe an accurate comparison at least in terms of size and weight, but… teddy? That was soft and harmless—and Mr. X knew by now it was very much not harmless, and… probably not soft.

            “Papá, please—”

            “No no, you listen. I’ve got to do this and it’s not a choice. You stay here and if you need anything just ask him. I won’t be gone for more than a few hours.”

            With that, Ramirez brushed past the Tyrant and swept out the door. The sound of the latch setting again ushered in a new, heavy silence. The bioweapon could feel the girl’s stare boring into the side of his head—watching him for any sudden moves with the same alertness that a Tyrant might train onto a potential threat. Understanding somewhat, Mr. X held completely still and listened for any indication that the tiny figure was moving out from her cover.

            The click and whirr of the fridge fan cutting on startled them both—Mariposa shrieked, the Tyrant jolted upright so hard the flooring shuddered, and it turned to see that the child had ducked further down and was only barely peeking over the island countertop at it. Briefly grumbling with embarrassment that it had reacted so strongly to so little, Mr. X eyed the floor as it reached up and scratched at the deformed grooves on its jaw. Being scared of something new was one thing… being scared of the box that kept the treats from spoiling was another entirely…

            “Um… Mr. X..?”

            He froze mid-itch at the trepidatious voice; the Tyrant turned to find that Mariposa had crept around the side of the kitchen. While still keeping a chair between herself and the hulking brute, she had cut the space between them by half, maybe more. Without the insufferable pressure of her unobservant (or uncaring) father forcing either of their hands, she seemed to calm down to the idea that this monster was “housebroken”—at least in the sense that it wouldn’t break the house. Not without orders to.

            Mariposa’s nose appeared to wrinkle up in contemplation as the Tyrant continued to watch her, making no move or noise but the normal bassy rush of its breathing.

            “…You don’t say much, do you.”

            Mr. X gave a sluggish blink; it could try to speak a word of two, but it wouldn’t have the slightest idea how the attempt would turn out—and it feared it may turn out like the ugly bellows and groans other Tyrants could more easily produce, so T-00 simply gave a creaky shake of its head.

            “So, you don’t talk?” Another shake, and Mariposa bit her lip as she processed what this meant for their hours stuck unattended together. “But… you listen?”

            It made sure it gave an emphatic nod to this, and then tilted its head as if alertly waiting to listen to her at this very second.

            “Okay…” She stepped out with care and no small degree of lingering trembles from the chair, peeking over her shoulder towards the back garden door, “May I… go outside? I wanna see Benji…”

            Benji. Dog’s name. The Tyrant recalled. The back garden of the house was a forty foot by fifteen foot rectangle with no known toxic or thorny plants, and it was northeasterly. Getting more and more shade soon. It should be safe; it would not be blinded by the California sunshine, and both sunburn and heatstroke would be less able to get at either of them. Mr. X gave a soft grunt that he hoped sounded affirmative and nodded.

            “You have to come with me, huh?” Another nod. “Okay… um… I’m going now.” The Tyrant watched as the small human very warily made her way to the back door, shooting looks its way every few steps as if to brace for the moment the massive form would start pursuing. Waiting until she had her hand to the door’s handle, T-00 started to follow with the lightest shuffling steps it could manage.

            The two of them kept about ten feet apart at minimum—keeping close tabs on each other but not being so jumpy or anxious now. This got even easier in the open space of the garden, especially as the golden-furred canine came loping around the side of the dry clumps of Pampas grass and wagged his whole body on sight of the little girl. T-00 planted its back to the house wall close by so it had the widest field of view and the most sun protection, and for a while it was almost as if the parental badgering, the uncomfortable introduction, and the sheer aura of child-endangerment which permeated the whole situation was no factor. The oblivious and overjoyed dog was a big help with that, and Mariposa bounded around with it as they gave the oversized tennis ball chewtoy a new coat of slobber and montane dust before both flopping down on the patio pavers and engaging in the kind of lazy cuddling that Mr. X could only give a curious stare. It had no context for this kind of contact; it sometimes bordered on violent the way she scratched at the domestic canine, but… Benji seemed to like it, and the dog rolling onto her lap and nuzzling her wet nose into her face was even drawing a few giggles. How… uncoordinated. How… how… something that he couldn’t connect the word for, but knew in its bones the concept of.

            Shit, damn… something. Other-expletive. It was on the tip of its… tongue? Brain? Subconscious linguistic knowledge? It knew what the “good uncoordinated not-serious companionship stress-relief good thing” was. It knew it. But a good word that summed the idea up had somehow not been something it had been exposed to in the growth chamber, it supposed.

            After more than an hour both dog and child were worn out, and their Tyrant chaperone had relaxed more, eyes half-hooded and drowsy. The sound of shoes scuffing nearby had it snapping back to alertness, and on looking down it found a surprise in the form of the little girl craning her neck up expectantly, hand just short of tugging at one of the gigantic hands. Benji padded up close by, wagging away as usual.

            “Mr. X, I’m gonna go in now. Can I take Benji with me?”

            T-00 remembered the dog being allowed inside before—especially when it was as hot as it had been today, so as he unstuck his back from the pebble-stucco of the wall he gave her a slight bob of the head. Benji led the way with tongue wagging in time with his tail.

            In the artificially-cooled interior, Mr. X let out a low huff. His mass was such that it was difficult for him to regulate his temperature once it got much hotter than 25 degrees Celsius. Staying in line of sight of the happy dog and the small child as they curled onto the floor by the couch, tired and joyous, it tried to focus otherwise on letting its system cool off back to normal. But after a moment, Mariposa asked a question, which took the Tyrant a moment to register from its unexpectedness:

            “Mr. X? Are you okay?”

            The Tyrant gave a forceful nod, which perhaps had the opposite effect as the large droplet of its sweat dived from the tip of its nose to the floor at the movement. Mariposa fixed it with an expression that it felt was familiar—maybe it had tried to aim that one at its own trainers, weeks and months ago…

            “Mr. X, do you know where dad keeps the ice cream?”

            T-00 truthfully did not, though the swift flicker of its pupils towards the freezer—where anything “ice” would logically go—betrayed something to the small girl. She stood and joined the hulking bioweapon in the kitchen area of the downstairs, pointing to the freezer section of the fridge.

            “Can you check if it’s in there? I can’t reach…”

            T-00 narrowed its eyes slightly, even as it took two ginger steps closer and reached to open the upper section of the refrigerator. There was a blast of refreshingly chilly vapor as it did so, and after that had passed it blinked rapidly and studied the slim pickings of the contents. There was, however, something which claimed to be “ice cream” within—and in a short motion it plucked the small box from its confines and let the freezer door swing shut and seal while it turned the container about. Not sure what to make of it, Mr. X lowered the package to where Mariposa could read the labels on its side.

            “Ooh…” At the way her eyes lit up, the Tyrant had a panicky feeling that it had just disobeyed Ramirez’s orders for this short guardianship period. But then… with how hot it was, and the man’s daughter had just been outside for so long…

            “…Are you allowed to have one?” Mariposa hesitated at reaching into the box, still lowered to where she could access it. Mr. X didn’t really have an answer. It assumed “no”, since it had never been given one of these “ice cream” things or even informed of their storage area. Almost as soon as it had managed a short shake of its head, Mariposa had pulled out two of the oblong objects and pushed one into the Tyrant’s free hand.

            “I’ll give you one, if you don’t say nothing to papá,” Mariposa smirked. Mr. X lifted up the comparatively tiny frozen treat as it returned the rest of the box to its normal position, and met the child’s gaze again.

            He nodded. Whatever the damn thing was, he was starting to smell it even through the foil wrapping, and whatever it was caused unrelenting rivulets of drool to keep forming at the edges of its tightly-sealed lips. Whatever it was was the good stuff, by the nutrient-hungry standards of a Tyrant. And it was cold as ice, still remaining so after more than a minute in the grip of an overheated bioweapon. Why would Ramirez not let his daughter have one of these, if they seemed so good?

            Oh.

            Oh!

            “Ice cream”, as it turned out, was indefinite proof that the universe was fundamentally good. After what by any numerical measure was only a few minutes, the Tyrant felt like it had experienced an hour of sugary and creamy wonder, all from the three-inch chunk of what Mariposa had specified was an “ice cream sandwich”—the brick of vanilla-flavored goodness wedged between chocolate cookies. T-00 barely knew what these specifications meant but committed them to memory anyways. At least, once it had become able to focus on any other incoming stimuli after the intense deliciousness had faded into the past. It let out an animalistic groan of pleasure before it considered how it may sound frightening to its nearby charge; it needn’t have worried, since Mariposa was licking the melted remnants from her fingers with similar noise and fervor though at a higher pitch and smoother, human vocal tones. Mr. X scooped up the foil pieces where they’d each left them and deposited them in the garbage bin. Mariposa had now settled on the rug in front of the television, petting Benji where he lay half-asleep and scanning through stations in search of something she liked. Mr. X eyed the temptingly large, luxurious couch which he generally was not given much chance to occupy; it was close to where his protective target now was, and he would have good peripherals on each side from there… why… not? But perhaps the most important reason was Mariposa:

            At the heavy creak of the wood flooring under the rugs behind her, the young girl paused in her channel surfing and caught the bioweapon red-handed halfway to the couch.

            “Is the couch, ah… strong enough?”

            Mr. X nodded. Somehow, the couch always held. Of course, it was designed to hold at least four humans weighing over two hundred pounds each, so a single Tyrant weighing almost that much by itself would still be within its design limits. Though, it could still be a fluke. It had only sat here twice before now, so it was still possible… Thankfully, even though it did creak and groan very tellingly, the couch did hold well enough that the Tyrant was able to relax. Mariposa started watching something which showed a number of strange animals—they were larger than humans, though by the way they moved slightly lighter than most Tyrants. Or at least more graceful. The camera zoomed and focused, and T-00 realized these were horses—fully-fleshed, healthy-looking horses, much unlike the half-lamed and raggedy one it had seen in person.

            “The horse only arrived in the American Southwest by chance… Most experts agree that the wild horses we see here are all descendants of domesticated horses brought to the southern part of the continent by the Spanish as early as the 1400s…” The Tyrant almost managed a frown out of pure confusion; despite what the voiceover said, the visuals of the program showed clearly labelled petrogylphs from the area in question from several thousand years prior to the “1400s” which had horses pointed out by convenient labels.

            “Nowadays, amongst the dry chaparral hills and the prairie plains, wild horse herds roam under the protection of a conservation branch of the US government—allowing for a certain number of wild mustang horses to be corralled, auctioned off, and trained to become domestic horses once more so that the many thousands of their wild cousins can continue to run free…”

            Why these apparently thousands of creatures could not do so without something of this sort occurring every year did not make particular sense—but thankfully the program moved on swiftly to another animal from the same region:

            “The Harris Hawk is another wondrous creature found in the American Southwest—one which boasts the title of the only bird of prey in the world which will hunt in packs.” T-00’s eyes flashed at the swift movement on the screen as several handsome-looking birds swept into view, and then looped joyfully into a thermal which took them high over a desert landscape. “Working together in the harsh arid environment, the Harris Hawks can between a group of three catch more than ten times the number of small rodents and reptiles as their closest relatives could on their own, making the cooperative arrangement entirely worth it. Falconers have begun capturing and taming these magnificent birds, bending their amazing talents and social habits to their own purposes…”

            … There seemed to be a pattern here. Animal was found useful—animal got caught and used for human interests. It almost seemed like all of the fanciful camera shots of wild things running and flying and the long-winded narration was just introduction to this idea. Mariposa apparently found this as dry and bizarre as they Tyrant did, and switched the channels again until she landed on one that cycled through daytime gameshows.

            “Alright, Karen—tell me something that frequently gets replaced on a car!”

            “Ummm… the mirrors?”

            This did not appear to be a very smart answer, and yet somehow the answer appeared among the top five of some kind of overall results. The most obvious explanation was that everyone shown was so terrible at operating motor vehicles they had to replace their broken-off mirrors often. Maybe that was the appeal of this game—to watch teams of perhaps the most foolish and ignorant specimens of humanity put these attributes on display to amuse the audience.

            It felt its head bob lower and awoke with a start—panic shooting through it as it realized it had started to drowse mid-watch. But there was… something wrong? No, not wrong; different. There was a slight warmth and pressure up against its side, and the arm on that side was propped up on a low, soft object.

            Mr. X started to move the arm to try and find the flat surface of the couch again, but froze as his palm bumped instead on the frail shoulders of the small girl. It craned its neck down fraction by fraction, trying not to move any other muscles; Mariposa had, beneath its notice, crawled up onto the open section of couch beside the bioweapon, wedging her tiny frame under its limp forearm and nestling her head into the crease and folds of its Limiter coat where its waist met its lap. As if the monstrosity’s leg was a comfy pillow. T-00 blinked as its bleary thoughts woke up further in order to race to the logical conclusion: It had clearly not just “started” to doze off… a sting of unease lit up in its chest and its hackles rose at the thought it had lapsed in this duty. It was supposed to protect her—if she had left the house again—or if that was the moment a rival company sent their agent—or if by pure accident she had gotten injured or threatened—

            Ramirez’s daughter suddenly shifted in her sleep, more onto her back, and as she did so her slender arms grasped up and ended up around the Tyrant’s arm. She was utterly dwarfed by the limb alone, and even the tight hug she had around it was barely making it through his tough sleeve and even tougher skin. Regardless, Mr. X could feel it, and the change had jarred him out of the panic spiral. The Tyrant’s heavily-wrinkled face softened up, and it studied its charge for a moment to ensure she was safe and well. It settled down once more, noting the low angle of the orange-gold sunlight streaking in through the kitchen windows; it estimated the time to be well over an hour later than Dr. Ramirez had said he would return. Its eyes flicked over to the child’s backpack hanging over the backrest of the chair, then to the wind rustling through the Pampas grass outside the window, and then the color and light of the vapid programming still on in the background.

            Ramirez did not return until it was almost dark, and aside from the façade of a bright and attentive reunion with Mariposa that he’d plastered over his clearly exhausted and aggravated inner feelings, the man did not linger on the surprise long absence and instead started throwing together something he’d called “mac and cheese”. Mariposa did not seem enthused, but she tolerated her father’s lazy cooking—especially since she had secretly pilfered the ice cream earlier. The doctor snappishly ordered Mr. X to take up a sentry position outside and leave them to their family time; the Tyrant grudgingly obeyed, shooting a pointed glance down at the lower cabinet where the nutrient gel base was stored but its yearning being ignored. It supposed it would have to wait another few hours. Very unfair, considering it had pulled so much additional weight that day. The bioweapon snorted once it was prowling its usual route in the dark. It was hungry, not starving. There was no danger in waiting a little longer. Mr. X would abide.

[antigonewinchester]

ooh share something about hesitation or triptych? <3

I will self-indulgently to do both <3

Hesitation but IC is inspired by a Destiel fic called, surprise surprise, Hesitation, written by apokteino, who I think was a fairly prominent fic writer back in the day? She had a series of dark Destiel fics, including Hesitation, the Bone series, the When series, and most infamously With Understanding. I find her work interesting intellectually, in her focus on exploring questions around sexual violence, relationships formed under duress, and the complexities of perpetrators & victims & their dynamics, but it feels like she maps her ideas onto SPN rather than centering canon characterizations or dynamics (at least in my read of the show/characters).

So, I decided to try my hand at a fic with the same premise but more in line with canon, particularly taking into account Cas's control/power over Dean in S4 (and which I don't feel is negated just because of Cas's sexual inexperience, altho it does add some complexity) and Dean's full experience in Hell. Part 1 is from Dean’s POV and Part 2, which I’m currently working on, is from Cas’s:

“You told me Dean wanted to have sex with me. He did, and then he didn’t.” Zachariah and he are sitting at a bar in New York, the city. It’s night, but he can’t see any stars, only the glowing of offices and apartments and advertisements against the sky. One large, flashing sign reads: Open Happiness. The moon is a cut of pure white. The humans around them talk and whisper, blissfully ignorant of the angels and the war they’re fighting to protect them. Their breath forms clouds that rise to disappear into the dark. All are dressed in what he believes are fancy clothes, long flowing red fabrics and unwrinkled suits of black, but he’s no longer sure how much he knows about humanity. Zachariah shrugs. “Humans say they want one thing, then do another, and Dean Winchester is no exception. This is why they need Heaven’s hand, Castiel.” The woman sitting to his left laughs. The man she’s talking with has taken her palm and put it up against his. Her fingernails had been carefully painted in stripes of white and black.

Triptych is sort of the opposite end of the spectrum, in that it’s my attempt at a Dean/Jack fic after looking on AO3 and finding... 2 decent fics of the whole bunch.

I started out as just wanting to do Dean/Jack during S14, but its slowly turned into Dean/Jack in the aftermath of Dean/John, probably in part 'cause I started writing it in the midst of Utena rewatch, which all about memories & cycles & incest & eternity (and then when I got to the part of S14 where Dean suggested locking himself in a coffin for eternity to save the world...) I was also struck by a post of someone discussing a common Utena interpretation that one character didn't actually want to sleep with her brother, but the poster asked if she did, would that desire negate any harm? Does wanting something "bad" mean you can't be hurt by it? If a relationship was both meaningful & hurts you, how do those elements go together?

Got a bit stalled out on this one because Holy Shit the emotional complexities here, and I want to handle it respectfully? Not be gauche? My plan is to have it all lead up to 14x20 and Thee Dean Jack Moment, re-contextualizing it within the scope of my fic, but I'm still figuring out what it all... adds up to, I suppose. (Also that I'm bad at writing character being mean, and Dean has to be mean in this fic, at least for parts of it!)

Heaven turned out to be the world’s best movie night: his favorite memories playing over and over and over again. The road trip where Sam introduced him to Harry Potter and Dean taught him how to read a paper map. He could rewind and play through his favorite five minutes as many times as he wanted. He could make everything faster or slower, which was funny for a little while, but he stopped after it got weird, like when he repeated a word too much and suddenly something would change and it wouldn’t be a real word anymore, just meaningless sounds. He could change from memory to memory in an instant, if he really wanted, but mostly he liked to let them play out before he moved onto another. And once he got to end, it was back to the beginning: a conversation trailed off or a lesson finished and then he was back at the start, to Cas’s reassuring smile, telling him about mistakes and guilt and forgiveness, or Sam’s bright concern, telling him how to take a punch, or Dean’s warm hand on his back, telling him where north was. The one thing he couldn’t do was imagine anything new. He tried, at first, in the memory of that day with Dean, how their conversation at the river could have gone—Dean’s voice low as he’d whispered, “Come here,” and then—and then—but it never worked. Guiltily he’d moved onto other memories, and at least they were too the same: if he'd ordered a hot dog, all he could eat is a hot dog; if Sam and Dean had driven past the apple orchard on a hunt, there was no turning down the short dirt road to pick fruit instead.

[myfriendskickass]

the thing about tumblr's moderation is that

yes they have transphobic enforcement of the rules

some people regardless of marginalized status are breaking the rules because harassment is against the rules

a lot of the time when you report harassment you get told its not actually harassment. what you're supposed to do is FOLLOW UP TO THAT EMAIL with a screencap/link of the thing you're reporting coupled with the specific rule they are breaking

no tumblr doesn't tell you this and that's bad

tumblr's communication is bad actually

and that is because the moderation is largely all bots due to how big tumblr is as a website with how small the staff is, and always has been, relative to how big the website is

and the problem is that even if your case gets seen by a human, none of those humans have moderation TRAINING

this is relevant because what the scum mass reporting people (for spam or otherwise) have learned to do is send hate that juuuuust skirts under the line of the rules so that when you report them, technically they AREN'T breaking the rules

their goal is to provoke you into losing your cool so that you snap and say something against the rules

and then an untrained moderator who is severely underpaid looks at it (if they ever do) and the only guideline they have is pattern matching to the TOU/Community Guidelines

This is why people were getting terminated for talking about their own experiences. (IYKYK) because TECHNICALLY, since it's autobiographical, it is a real person. and TECHNICALLY that is against the rules. But untrained moderators/bots do not have the ability/time to like...use common sense.

I genuinely believe that tumblr support staff is at least trying their best, at least 50% of the time. It's just that the site is so big that they don't have the mod team to do it. They have to rely on bots that can be manipulated by spam, and the few humans they do have aren't trained to know how to spot these types of "you are being provoked into lashing out" type situations or the common sense to know "autobiographies are not the same thing as the content we're trying to prevent" because they are overworked and underpaid. This is also probably why it takes them ages to get back to you and why the communication is so bad.

The real solution is hire more humans and actually train them and stop relying on bots.

My experience with tumblr support is that aside from trying to report harassment that one time that I didn't follow up on because I didn't know you had to do that (and I know it's like why am I doing their jobs for them but with a team this small and overworked, it actually IS helpful to include the thing you're reporting again in a follow up email so that you CAN sway an actual human being) support has almost always responded to all of my bug reports extremely quickly.

They've also responded to reports of my trans friends who are publically out on this website extremely quickly too.

On the same side, they have also banned and then reinstated another trans friend 15 times for talking in detail about their transition experiences. (all text no images) Which we can all agree is fucked up. Same issue with the autobiographical experience fiasco. There was also somebody I followed who reported a bug and then tumblr noticed they had a bunch of sideblogs that were basically empty and deleted their account because of url squatting and it took them a whole week to get it back, at the cost of having to give up sideblog projects they really did intend to get to before their health took a nosedive. (Which, the thing is, TECHNICALLY, that IS url squatting! And yes, a reasonable mod team with training would be able to suss that out, but at the same time, if they let one person hoard urls to "get to eventually", even if they are sincere, how are they going to reasonably distinguish that from somebody who IS trying to exploit things? This is an unfortunate use case.)

On ANOTHER side, a lot of the people (but not all, obviously!) who get banned (popular bloggers esp) actually DID say some really vile things that most people don't know about that violates TOS/CG and the thing is is that when tumblr bans you, EVERY IMAGE from your blog, including old reblog chains, gets removed too. That's how innocuous stuff ends up getting the "this violates guidelines" picture - OP got banned for something you probably didn't see because not everybody sees every post by ever user ever, and tumblr removed all their content.

This happens to Nazis and TERFS a lot, actually, because they're very good at keeping the real heinous shit they say to their own circles. These two groups, btw, do in fact get banned a LOT and they are constantly remaking. (Tumblr is actually extremely chill about ban evasion. Due to how the moderation is, that's a good thing, but on any other website, you can in fact get banned permanently. Those websites have better moderation though.)

Overall, the problem with tumblr moderation is inconsistency. Everything is a random crapshoot to how you get treated and it's really easy to spin this as "staff is deliberately hurting XYZ" but I think the real problem under the hood is that there's simply too few humans (causing a backlog of response time/communication) + over reliance on bots (making it easy to spam report people into getting their blogs banned) + the few humans they do have are untrained and underpaid (making them want to close cases as quickly as possible to move on to the next one/being unsure of how to make moderation decisions so they rely on strict interpretations of the rules.)

Basically, tumblr is not actively malicious (with the exception of that one transphobic moderator they since fired apparently), they are randomly incompetent. And the randomness is what makes this truly awful.

[random-thought-depository]

My headcanons for Blindsight vampire consciousness/internal experience:

This post makes a good introduction to my ideas about what Blindsight vampires are like, so I recommend reading it before reading this; just about everything in there is part of my headcanons for what Blampires are like, a lot of what I write here is basically an elaboration on the ideas there.

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

""That too," Sarasti admitted, and looked right at me.

For the first time, I looked right back. And felt a shock of recognition.

I still wonder why I never saw it before. For all those years I remembered the thoughts and feelings of some different, younger person, some remnant of the boy my parents had hacked out of my head to make room for me. He'd been alive. His world had been vibrant. And though I could call up the memories of that other consciousness, I could barely feel anything within the constraints of my own.

Perhaps dreamstate wasn't such a bad word for it…" - Blindsight.

This makes it sound like vampires just don't have many intense emotions. I think this would fit well with my idea that vampires are very lazy creatures because they're basically built around keeping their metabolism as low as possible, and they're much less playful than humans (with play being broadly defined to include things like art, abstract curiosity, fantasies, and non-reproductive sex) because play is a product of surplus energy.

An idea I like here is this high priority on energy conservation/laziness extends to the way vampires think; they are much less prone to recursive thoughts, fantasies, daydreaming, idle musings, idle reminiscence, etc.. Their consciousness is very "in-world"; they are very focused on situational awareness and on matters directly relevant to their survival or social or reproductive success. This has some drawbacks, I think beings like this would tend to be kind of uncreative and mentally rigid compared to humans, but in a way it makes their brains more efficient; they are much less distracted/distractable and efficiently devote all or most of their cognitive resources to the highest priority matters at hand.

Ancient vampires probably had an activity pattern common in carnivores and low-metabolism ectothermic animals, of long periods of low activity punctuated by short periods of intense activity. I think this also might extend to how vampires think. By default most of the time they aren't doing much and don't really need those big brains for much, so they just kind of... put most of their brains in standby mode. Vampire mental and emotional life follows the patterns of a predator activity cycle: long periods of dull stupor punctuated by short bursts of brilliance and passion. When a vampire's brain comes fully on-line they are a brilliant superhuman genius, but most of the time they just don't have much going on up there. This was probably more true for ancient vampires than modern ones; modern vampires must to some extent accommodate themselves to the structure and demands of human society and probably spend more time "fully awake" (I wonder if they find this tiring?).

Actually, I think it'd be very on-brand if vampires by default spend most of their lives in a sort of very shallow open-eye sleep similar to the way cats sometimes sleep. During this state they would still be aware of their surroundings and would still have enough mental activity to recognize situations in which they need to wake up, and they might have a degree of high-function somnambulism (e.g. an ancient vampire mother might be able to let its offspring suckle and hold it to keep it from wandering out of line of sight, and I think it's not too outrageous to imagine a modern vampire might be able to get out of bed, use the toilet, take a shower, make and eat some ramen, brush its teeth, clean the bowl and pot and spoon, and go back to bed all without waking up), but they wouldn't have much else going on "up there."

One implication of that is the line between sleep and wakefulness might be much fuzzier for vampires than for humans. Let's suppose the modern vampire in the previous example gets a phone call while it's getting back into bed. It checks the phone, recognizes the name of its human boss on the caller ID, and immediately recognizes this as a situation that requires higher cognitive activity and wakes itself up. Once awake, it clearly remembers what it was doing, experiencing, and thinking when in shallow open-eye sleep and experiences no real discontinuity between the two states, its mental activity has simply increased. It spends a split second mentally reviewing the current work flow situation and deciding if it really needs to take this call, and decides it can be safely ignored. It promptly falls back into very shallow open-eye sleep, puts the phone on its bedstand, and tucks itself back into bed. A similar scenario might play out when an ancient vampire in open-eye sleep sees its sister and its mate enter the family hidey-hole empty-handed after an unsuccessful hunt.

Vampires might experience many gradations of consciousness as their brains finely adjust their brain activity level depending on the cognitive demands of the situation. I think vampires would be most conscious when they are socializing, when they are hunting or fighting, and when they are otherwise dealing with complex and unpredictable situations.

Note: in this model vampires do kind of just "no thoughts empty head" when they are alone or otherwise feel safe (or at least safe-ish) and have nothing in particular to do, but I think vampires would also have something very much like this behavior (mentioned in that post about owls that's one of my favorite references for possible Blindsight vampire behavior):

"In many ways, an owl is very much a wise animal because they devote all their time to silently observing. What people mistake as the bird simply “zoning out” is actually the bird analyzing everything it’s hearing and seeing. They don’t need to look around to observe, their ears see even more than their very keen eyes. They make silent note of everything you do in their presence, and if you misstep and cross them, they will remember it."

In social situations vampires are very much doing that! Blindsight itself mentions this as a vampire behavior:

"So, what are they like?" Pag asked.

"Vampires? I don't know. Just met my first one yesterday."

"And?"

"Hard to read. Didn't even seem to be aware of his surroundings sometimes, he seemed to be... off in his own little world."

"He's aware all right. Those things are so fast it's scary. You know they can hold both aspects of a Necker cube in their heads at the same time?"

This essay is a real-world reference I often turn to when thinking about how to write superhumanly intelligent characters (Blampires, Known Space Protectors, WH40K Primarchs, etc.), and in the context of thinking about how vampires might experience a much fuzzier boundary between sleep and waking consciousness something in it draws my eye:

"My first memories, from age 2-3, are what other people call a dream; my first recalled body-shape was not human. I was a horse who woke up as a human child! I've never had much trouble recalling dreams, including those from REM states earlier in the night, which in normal people fade out or get overwritten by later cycles in the night. I won't bother listing all the peculiarities of prodigal dreaming that I think exist--after all, I've posted a thousand dreams as examples. In brief, the dream-state for prodigies is clearer and very different from the state described by normal and gifted people, and even may differ physically."

If vampires have something like this, having more vivid and realistic dreams that feel more like waking consciousness and being able to recall them in more detail and clarity on waking, that would fit well into the "line between sleep and wakefulness might be much fuzzier for vampires" idea.

I suspect a big thing consciousness is good for in hominids is social stuff; to figure out how other people will react to you and how to get them to act the way you want them to act it really helps to have a model of yourself! So, a lot of what you have to do to be socially intelligent is, you have to build accurate models of your own mind and the minds of others and imagine how they'll interact. And isn't that a lot like dreaming? I think very intelligent beings who experience many fine gradations of consciousness, are often most conscious during social interactions, and experience waking consciousness and dreams as subjectively similar might have something like this thought, so something like this idea might have been part of ancient vampire cultural lore. I think, rather than the human awake/asleep dichotomy, ancient vampire culture may have thought in terms of a spectrum with deep dreamless sleep at one pole and the sort of consciousness experienced in dangerous and complicated social situations at the other. In this spectrum, very shallow open-eye sleep might be close to the deep dreamless sleep pole, while complex social interactions, hunting rapture, and the dreams experienced during deep sleep would be close to the hyperconsciousness pole. Ancient vampires may have seen waking consciousness and the dreams experienced in sleep as closely related and kindred phenomena, and even used the same word for both states!

In the Blindsight elsewhere fic set around 8,000 BCE that I'm working on, I "translate" the word my vampire characters use for humans as "Dreamers," and that's the context for that. In their language and culture it has connotations of "fully awake a lot" but also "lost in their own heads a lot, tending to pay more attention to imaginary constructs than to the real things in front of their faces" (they see humans' inferior situational awareness as partly a product of that, and they aren't wrong!). The phrase somebody in their culture might use for "I miss my recently deceased partner and I can't stop thinking about them and I think I might be engaging in maladaptive perseveration about them" would more accurately translate as "[Speaker's name] wanders the pastward dream-paths like a Dreamer, seeking [dead spouse's name] there" (modern vampires do the perpetual present tense thing, you bet old vampires had weird ways of talking about time and memory!).

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

"He never uses the past tense," I murmered.

"Huh? Oh, that." Pag nodded. "They never experience the past tense. It's just another thread to them. They don't remember stuff, they relive it."

"What, like a post-traumatic flashback?"

"Not so traumatic." He grimaced. "Not for them, at least." - Blindsight.

So, the way I interpret this is vampires have very vivid and detailed memories and imaginations, to the point that remembered and imagined experiences are often about as subjectively real to them as their real-time sensory inputs. For instance, when a vampire remembers holding a glass, at least if it's concentrating on the memory, it feels like touching a real physical object; it experiences the weight, the resistance of the glass against its fingers, the coldness, etc.. A vampire with its brain running at anything remotely close to full capacity is experiencing very detailed and vivid subjective worlds of memory and imagination parallel to the "real world." If a human had memory and imagination that worked like this I think it would cause very disabling sensory and intellectual overload and they'd become very "lost in their head," it'd be like having the sensory input from three or six different bodies pumped into your brain simultaneously, but vampires have the sensory processing capacity and intelligence to deal with multiple subjective worlds simultaneously with no loss of functionality in the "real world."

Tangential aside: vampires have something like HSAM as part of their standard neurotype; they remember the past in much more detail than (most if not all) humans, and they're very fast learners.

Modern vampires have perpetual present tense as a signature linguistic quirk, and I think ancient vampire language and culture might have conceived of memory and imagination in a sort of many-worlds-ish way, like they would talk about past times and possible future worlds as if they're physical places that you physically travel to when you think about them. Like...

An ancient vampire sentence that might be translated as "I think you'd have a roughly 20% possibility of winning that fight," might be more faithfully translated as "[Speaker's name] wanders the futureward dream paths in which [listener's name] battles [name of enemy], and in approximately one in five of the potential worlds [speaker's name] visits, [listener's name] is victorious."

An ancient vampire name that might be roughly translated as Strategist might more accurately be translated as "far-ranging scout of the futureward dream paths."

An ancient vampire that recently lost a long-term companion and was admitting to a common ancient vampire grief behavior might say something best translated as "[Speaker's name] wanders the pastward dream paths, seeking past worlds where [dead person] lives, to spend time in [dead person]'s company."

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

This post pretty well outlines my headcanons for how vampires experience, relate to, and express (or don't express) pain.

I'd also add to it: when a vampire is hunting, enraged, or afraid, it enters a state kind of like dothe and the limiters that normally exist keep it from doing things that might damage its body are overridden; in that state it can be a lot less responsive to pain than normal, but it's still aware of injuries and would prefer to avoid damaging its body.

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

An idea I like, drawing inspiration from that post about owls, is vampires are actually kind of delicate, nervous, and fearful creatures, but this isn't obvious to humans because vampires don't express distress the way a human would. Vampire instincts and reflexes are built around the assumption that adult vampires can't count on receiving help or mercy if injured or sick and are likely to face situations where showing visible signs of pain would be worse than useless as it would alert enemies to their increased vulnerability. Vampire children in distress may cry out, but vampire adults instinctively hide vulnerability and express distress by flight, hiding, or aggression.

A predator's life involves careful risk/reward calculations and is in a way inherently more precarious than a plant-eater's life because it feeds higher up the food chain, where less calories and biomass are available (but what is available is more concentrated); an effective predator is not a hyperaggressive berserker, but a careful and cautious killer that avoids unnecessary fights and avoids fights against strong victims/enemies (this is why predators prefer to attack sick, injured, old, immature, or otherwise weak victims; ancient vampire predation likely followed a similar pattern, and I suspect that they also preferentially targeted socially vulnerable humans as many human serial killers do). Humans would be a nightmare to have as an obligate prey item: we're smart, we make weapons, we work in groups, we plan ahead with long time horizons, we seek revenge, and we hold grudges. Vampires were probably often quite dangerous to each other, competing fiercely for the very limited trophic space available in their very narrow and insecure ecological niche (as well as for normal animal points of contention such as mating opportunities). So I think vampire instincts would be very built around helping them survive in a very dangerous world. A vampire instinctively wants to hide most of the time, especially from humans, and if it can't do that it feels uncomfortable and unsafe. Vampires like to be alone in small private chambers with locked doors; there they can relax in a place where they are not seen and they are protected from potential enemies, in conditions that approximate the claustrophobic tomb-like hidden den of an ancient vampire individual or family. A vampire feels unsafe and uncomfortable in a place like a busy street, where it's surrounded by humans and clearly visible and can't be sure it'll be able to easily hide if it has to. Vulnerability tends to make vampires feel unsafe and uncomfortable, especially if other people are around; a sick or injured vampire being tended and given medical attention by humans is a nervous, skittish, prickly vampire. Vampires are instinctively nervous and uncomfortable around other people unless it's an individual they have formed a very close relationship with; if you were an ancient vampire, just about the only thing more dangerous to you than a human was a vampire who wasn't part of your family.

I think a plausible downside of those splendid vampire senses is vulnerability to sensory overload. For instance, I think going into a bar might have been a very disagreeable experience for Valerie. Being in a crowded space full of humans with no guarantee of an easy exit or hiding place would make her nervous and uncomfortable. But also, there might be loud music, bright and flashing or moving lights, maybe a TV on or whatever the Blindsight era equivalent is, a lot of people talking, and all those drinks and food and sweaty humans in a confined space might be quite pungent. This would tend to blur out softer sounds and make it harder to infer the sources of subtle scents and would fill her neural circuits with junk data, force her brain to work harder to assemble a detailed and accurate model of her environment. This would be a kind of vulnerability, so she'd find it very disagreeable; it would make her nervous and uncomfortable. I think this might be a common experience for modern vampires; a modern city probably has a lot more bright and flashing and moving lights and a lot more fast-moving objects, and lot more loud, persistent, and complex background noise than anything ancient vampires regularly had to deal with (closest equivalent might have been an ancient vampire who lived near a big waterfall and had to filter out its constant roaring). In this vampires might have experiences in common with autistic people. Humans in ancient times likely had anti-vampire defense tactics that exploited vampire vulnerability to sensory overload.

Hmm, does this remind you of Sarasti's theory about Scramblers interpreting human signals as a malicious attempt to make them waste cognitive resources trying to understand nonsense? He wouldn't be the first neuroatypical person to project his own frustrations with a society not built for people like him onto the alien!

As I said in that post about the broken arm scene in Echopraxia I linked to earlier, I think it's interesting to look at Valerie's behavior through the lens of "distress in vampires is often expressed as aggression." Two prominent examples of her "scary" behavior happen in situations that I think would be very disagreeable for a vampire. When she's nervous and uncomfortable, she tries to make you afraid of her.

I think divide and conquer might be another example of this. In Echopraxia, Peter Watts implies a connection between divide and conquer and the vampire facial recognition function. The way I interpret that is: when a vampire recognizes another vampire face, this triggers a reflexive surge of fear (and maybe also anger, which would likely be triggered by fear of a stranger anyway). Echopraxia implies that in modern vampires this reflex may have been deliberately strengthened by a genetic tweak, to make them less able to cooperate with each other, but I prefer to interpret divide and conquer as primarily a matter of nurture. The crucial difference is that ancient vampires got to socialize with other vampires while they were children. By doing this, a vampire would get training early in life to emotionally self-regulate when the fear reflex hit, and it would develop positive associations with the faces of its family that would counterweight the fear, and its memory would become filled with examples of the presence of others of its own kind having benefits as well as dangers which it could remember when the fear reflex hit. The fear reflex is likely weaker in young vampire children and gradually strengthens as a vampire matures, so by socializing with other vampires from infancy onward a vampire would get to gradually acclimate. Modern vampires are isolated from other vampires during childhood, so they don't get any of this, and they don't have experience dealing with other people as smart, strong, and fierce as themselves, which makes that experience scarier to them. If a modern vampire gets put in a room with another vampire they are unable to self-regulate emotionally and go into a sort of panic attack where they become completely focused on escaping from or destroying the perceived threat. The fact that they probably know this happens when two vampires get put into the same room doesn't help; they are expecting the other vampire to attack them very soon, and they are expecting any attempts they might make to self-regulate out of reflexive aggression to fail, and they are thinking maybe they should attack first so they have first mover advantage, so it becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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

I think vampire children might seem a lot more human-like than vampire adults, at least in some ways. I think vampire children would probably have much higher metabolisms than vampire adults, because they're still growing. Their brains would also be highly active more often, because they're still in their high-intensity learning phase of life. Play is a signature behavior of highly intelligent animals, a kind of learning strategy, so I think it's very likely that vampire children played. I think they'd like games that kind of simulate hunting; they'd love hide and seek, modern small vampire children would like chasing laser pointers and wind-up mice like a house cat, and ancient vampire children probably often got their start as hunters by chasing and killing small animals as a kind of game that doubled as a way to acquire snacks. Vampire children would probably be more sociable and in some ways friendlier than vampire adults, as in ancient vampire society they'd need to socialize with their elders to learn from them and they'd be dependent on older members of their social group (being more sociable would also tend to lead to their brains being highly active more of the time).

Put this together with my ideas about how vampire brains work, and this means when vampires reach adulthood they'd have an experience similar to Siri:

"For all those years I remembered the thoughts and feelings of some different, younger person, some remnant of the boy my parents had hacked out of my head to make room for me. He'd been alive. His world had been vibrant. And though I could call up the memories of that other consciousness, I could barely feel anything within the constraints of my own." - Blindsight.

I love how that would add a poignant new dimension to that scene! Something like that happened to Sarasti too, but for him it was a normal and inevitable consequence of his biology, a normal part of growing up!

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

From that prodigies essay:

"For example, I've noticed that the normal and the gifted treat thought and feeling as somehow antagonistic. I see this from the outside, but I don't get it. When I use abstract concepts they aren't defenses against feeling; words and ideas don't push me away from passion. Why should they? Logic and abstractions go back to my infancy. Analysis was part of my everyday flow as a small child, it was part of the feelings. Images too: if I try to express what I feel deeply about, I'm likely to use a dream image, not emotional labels, for such images are realer to me than normal people's language."

I really like the idea that vampires are like this, with the kind of belligerent twist you'd expect from them. A vampire doesn't experience fear, anger, or bloodlust as pushing it away from rational thought. Vampire terror, rage, or hunting rapture is a kind of terrible analytical calm focus; they are thinking clearly, they are highly aware of their environment and tracking many variables, they are capable of intricate and brilliant tactical and strategic thought, and their intelligence is very focused on the matter of hand. Terror, rage, and hunting rapture actually make a vampire smarter, because when a vampire is in those states its metabolism is running hot and its brain is freely burning glucose with all the energy-conservation limiters that normally limit its intelligence overridden.

I really like how beautifully that idea fits with Sarasti's wall of simulated screaming faces; they'd help him think better by triggering his predatory instinct! This also suggests another interpretation or layer of the broken arm scene in Echopraxia: Valerie is using self-harm as a kind of meditation technique, making herself smarter by deliberately inflicting pain and distress on herself while also tempting herself with a situation that triggers her predatory instincts (close proximity to a human who's obviously afraid of her). This is making me imagine other ways she might baffle and disturb the humans around her by indulging in this habit; like, imagine she's in a conference and she just casually breaks two of her own fingers while you're talking to her, or she comes out of her meditation chamber having very obviously slashed her arms with a knife a bunch of times while she was in there.

I think there's some definite dark comedy potential in the basically harmless but ridiculously edgelord productivity hacks modern vampires might develop if you go with the model!

With this model of vampire cognition, insofar as fear, anger, and bloodlust can cause a lack of self-control in vampires, it's subtler than how it happens in humans; a sort of temporary intellectual tunnel vision. For instance, the hyperaggression/panic attack that happens when two modern vampires are in close physical proximity isn't panic in the sense humans think of it, a vampire in that situation is still thinking clearly and intelligently, but its intelligence is totally focused on eliminating the threat posed by the other vampire. You might be able to goad a vampire into making a long-term strategic mistake by making it really angry, but you'd never be able to use that tactic to goad it into rushing you when it'd be immediately tactically smarter for it to hold back.

Regarding the images thing: I think it also would be very on-brand if vampire cognition is very "thinking in pictures"; they primarily think in images, emotions, and sense-impressions, with words being secondary and used more for communicating their ideas to others than to structure their own thoughts. Since vampires are less social than humans I think it'd make sense if they have slower childhood language acquisition than humans (especially relative to the length of their childhood, which I think would likely be shorter than ours), and that would likely contribute to this; they'd get more grounding in the physical before learning language and they'd have more time to develop strong habits of thinking without words. Slower language acquisition but high intelligence and mostly faster brain development would synergize with this; the vampire brain would do more of its development in silence (or, more precisely, in wordlessness - language would be only a small part of the rich world of sound that would be perceptible with vampire hearing!). I can't remember a time before I had language, and I expect I'm pretty typical for humans in that. A vampire might vividly remember what it was like to have no language and what it was like to acquire it from that starting point.

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

Vampires are sociopath-adjacent, but I think they must have some capacity for altruism cause otherwise it's hard to imagine how any ancient vampire survived their childhood. I guess vampires might have some sort of evolutionary fairy human "breeding instinct," but they're closely related to humans so I think it's more parsimonious to think they just have the same neurological features that motivate humans to care for their children. This implies vampires have some capacity for affection.

My interpretation is vampires are usually fundamentally selfish in their actions and relationships, but they are capable of genuinely affectionate relationships with people they're very close to (though these relationships probably often still look kind of weird and scary by human standards). I think the easiest, safest, and most reliable way to get two vampires to like each other in this way might be for them to socialize extensively with each other while one or both of them was still a child, so childhood imprinting of this sort may have played a very big role in ancient vampire sociality. I also have an idea that vampire mothers might imprint something on their offspring during gestation that causes the mother and offspring to feel "warm fuzzies" when they smell each other's scent, encouraging them to bond, and this effect might also be transitive to more distant matrilineal relatives; that might also have been important in ancient vampire sociality.

I think modern vampires might have a lot fewer close relationships than ancient ones because they don't get childhood imprinting with others of their own kind. Presumably they had human caregivers when they were children, but I think the imprinting might not properly take then, like a vampire child might be intuitively seeing human adults as prey and threats rather than elders to look up to, especially as they start to become stronger and smarter than us and the humans around them start to get increasingly obviously afraid of them. As a consequence, modern vampires might be a lot closer to being pure sociopaths.

[wetslug]

ive mentioned it briefly but i thought i'd elaborate and give yall the full story of How High School Me Accidentally Induced a Mental Disorder, if anyones interested and wants to learn from my folly

alright so its ~2014, im in grade 10, i've been Dx'ed with autism about a year now, and my depression is as bad as its ever been. basically everything sucked so my brain was naturally susceptible to just short circuiting and causing more problems in the first place

i think my first tics (which were small neck and eye muscle tics) were probably no fault on my own, because like i said my brain frequently Sucked at that time and this is a common age to develop tic problems. but at that time, i had multiple friends with tics, and as I love to research my own problems, I was looking up potential diagnoses all the time, and interacting with online content trying to find tics that looked like mine. soon, my tics were almost incapacitating, i had to modify my schooling because it was distracting to other students, i had pseudoseizures that would last for minutes, and my body was in constant pain because it was always twisting and convulsing. looking back at it now though, i realize that my tics HEAVILY mirrored the ones my friends had and the ones i read about/saw on the internet

i was misdiagnosed with tourettes, which was then changed to Functional Movement/Neurological Disorder, which is a bit of a catch-all term for certain neurological symptoms that can't be linked to an organic problem with the brain (i.e. your brain hardware is fine but software isnt working). a feature of FND is the symptoms often improve with distractibility (they decrease when you focus on something else), and are more suggestible than other organic-related disorders such as tourettes (though the basis of tourettes is still little understood).

why did my brain "decide" to induce problems?? some aspects I think that contributed: -humans are extremely social and are great at mirroring behavior -especially when that behavior is coming from people you admire i.e. your friends! -simply watching a motor movement can cause motor mimicry and automatic imitation (possibly through mirror neurons). this is a big help for most of the human experience.. except for this one -i was in so much mental pain that I appreciated (subconsciously) when people could physically see that i had a problem -humans like attention, this is normal !! again, when youre a shitty lil teen and your life sucks, sometimes it can be gratifying for people and doctors to worry about you

its been 9 years now, and i mostly have a handle on my FND (i will tic a couple times a day, moreso when i drink or too much caffeine), mostly by treating the underlying triggers (mostly my depression) and not worrying or giving it attention when i tic.

in retrospect, i should have been stopped consuming such content and effectively triggering myself immediately when i saw i was taking on those characteristics. but ofc i was 15 and a dumbass and didnt realize what i can see now. if youre a teenager, you know youre susceptible to mirroring behaviors, and you consume mental illness/disorder content or conversations with peers, i would be VERY careful about monitoring yourself and making sure you're not accidentally triggering yourself and taking on the same symptoms. its no fault of your own, it doesnt mean youre a 'faker' if it happens, and it doesnt mean youre weak. some tips i have to avoid this while still consuming said stuff; -i found written content (like blogposts) were less triggering than video form content -try communicating with friends online/by text/etc to avoid seeing their tics irl. without being a dick ofc its not your friends fault that your brain said Copy Paste -rather than research into tackling the tics itself, see if you can identify what may have precipitated it or seems to make it worse (such as stress, low blood sugars, etc), and try to work on that. see if it subsequently improves the secondary disorder.

OF COURSE IM NOT A DOCTOR DONT SUE ME ASJKDJKDAS IF U HAVE SUCH PROBLEMS SEE A DOCTOR

[aita-blorbos]

AITA for creating a nightmare realm on a different plane of existence and dragging all students from my own founded school with me?

I (can't remember my age, M) used to go to a college which was heavily focused on the research of human evolution, and was well regarded by the general public as a result. The school found an ancient labyrinth underneath a city where we learned of an ancient race of humans that lived side by side with the Great Ones, the latter of which later ascended and left those humanoids to wait and look after the place. The head of the school (almost as ancient as those labyrinths lolllll, M), who we'll call W, and an old schoolmate of mine (can't care enough to learn that douche's name, M), who we'll call L, got into a dispute sometime later. W thought that, to evolve humanity to the level of the Great Ones and to ascend, we only needed insight, and to grow eyes on our brains. L, having found a left behind Great One, thought that, to ascend, we needed to use their blood. W thought the blood was dangerous, and that humanity should not treat something like that carelessly.

The two couldn't find common ground, so L went off to start his own organization, focused only on blood. It became the main trade of the city, since the Great Ones' blood could heal any injury or illness of a human, but he conveniently never mentioned, and continuously covered up, the fact that that blood mutated humans overtime, turning them into beasts from overuse.

Obviously, this was stupid and not at all the way to ascend, so I veered away from both W and L's organizations to start my own, which focused more on first learning of the Great Ones and reaching out to commune with them. For this research, we needed people, so I had some trained fighters and hardy criminals roam the streets of the city nearby to bring those people here for us to experiment on. This may sound bad, but it was a necessary step to ascension, and who cares anyway? Humanity was well out of its prime, it was time to leave this plane, anyway. My organization tried to make an artificial Great One out of bodies merged together, which didn't go quite as planned, and it reeked on top of that. Big disappointment, and now the streets are prowling with human amalgamations of several things. I tried the eye method as well, by taking the eyes of some prisoners and lining the brains of some others with them, but to no avail. I concluded ascension isn't something humans can do artificially.

One old classmate of mine had managed to ascend, but she became braindead as a result, or otherwise unable to communicate back to us, probably because it was too much for her. This led me to believe that it's not possible for just one person at a time, but that a group should be able to do it together. I also learned that dreams were the answer, and that to get closer to the Great Ones and directly communicate with them, dreams were our best option. I had everyone in my organization don a ritualistic cage on their head as a sort of antenna to direct Them to us, like a lightning rod, and we eventually managed to all leave this world behind and enter a nightmare, of which I am the host. We have audience with a Great One (infant, M?), but other than myself and some guy that tried to spy on us and thought I wouldn't notice lol, I haven't actually seen any others, though all our bodies in the waking world are long abandoned and dead. I don't think that counts as murder, I clearly explained the steps to take.

Anyway, TLDR, both the use of Great Ones blood and just gaining insight are stupid ideas, so I turned to closer research and dreams to ascend. Some sacrifices had to be made, so I hired kidnappers and had experiments performed on people to get closer to the truth, including fusing bodies together and creating a mass of rotting corpses to try and become an artificial Great One. Some people got caught inside the walls, too, but that's not on me, I didn't do any carpenting. It's not like I lied about blood being good for us and covering up the people losing their lives to it all just to save face, either. Furthermore, my method actually worked after all! So, AITA?

I know it all sounds very bad, but do consider I'm neurodivergent.

[badmusejail]

Gaster and Surface Life / Human-Monster Relations.

I don't have any exact headcanon as to where exactly Mt. Ebott is, but usually place is somewhere in Washington state. I don't have anything against headcanons putting it elsewhere and I'm more than happy to use your headcanons instead--I put it in the USA because I live in the USA and have the best understanding of USA politics.

As is probably expected, the world didn't immediately take kindly to the arrival of the monsters, even with Frisk vouching for them. People are heavily divided on their opinions, with some people wanting to kill the monsters, some wanting to force them back into the mountain, some wanting to exploit or enslave them, and the few wanting to welcome them with the same rights that humans have.

Each of the monsters engage with the world in their own way, but the vast majority of important discussions only involve Asgore, Toriel, Undyne, and a couple other designated monsters, sometimes including Gaster.

It's an extremely tense and precarious situation, with monster leadership well aware of how easily things could go south and lead to a complete genocide of the people.

For this reason, Asgore in particular tends to be submissive, willing to comply with unreasonable demands if only to avoid bloodshed.

Undyne has her misgivings, but usually defers to Asgore's decisions. For all of her hotheadedness, she knows better than to make a scene at the wrong time.

Toriel, despite Gaster's negative opinion of her, is likely the most reasonable of the negotiators, working hard to find a fair solution for everyone involved.

Finally, Gaster himself is the most difficult, refusing to bend to humanity's worse demands, and standing with a bluntness in heavy contrast to Toriel's polite firmness.

He has refused to share his technology and research and has barred humanity from entering the critical parts of the CORE. In general, his appearances on the council are stoic and curt, a heavy undertone of aggression beneath icy formal responses.

On at least one occasion, he had to be escorted out by Toriel for becoming too aggressive.

His refusal comes not from a place of malice, but from a seated belief that if they fail to set proper boundaries, humanity's demands will only grow until monsters are no better off than they started. To him, standing their ground and refusing to allow any mistreatment from the very beginning is an absolute necessity.

In contrast, most monsters, including Asgore, take a note gradual approach, thinking that it's important that they emphasize their willingness to cooperate and that they're not a threat, and then working to improve the situation from there. There are monsters that support Gaster's methods, but he is by far the most vocal, stubborn, and famous of them.

This has made Gaster the biggest threat to anti-monster groups and a common target of those expressing their hatred.

He's been known to ignore the harassment when its directed to him, but tends to escalate quickly when other monsters are targeted in his vicinity. Asgore once had to talk him out of killing a few humans that were harassing him.

For as confident and unshakeable Gaster presents himself when formally speaking on the matter, in person he's a much different monster; rather nervous, easily cowed and surprisingly friendly.

Luckily for everyone, Papyrus is remarkably well liked among the humans and Sans is discreet enough that he hardly gets any attention. Woe be onto the unfortunate humans that target them.

Above all else, Gaster wants peace too, regardless of his general dislike of humans. But his opinions are heavily colored by past experiences and should it come to extremes, he would choose his people over humanity and would destroy every human if necessary.

He understands that it makes him just as bad as the humans that would kill them. He would do it anyways.

It takes Gaster several months before he spends any real amount of time on the surface, and he still retreats to his lab often. However, he does enjoy the vast offerings of the surface, and for as much as he hates humanity, he has a very difficult time hating individual humans he meets.

He's easily attracted by colorful lights and noises and is quite fond of the whimsical nonsense humans produce. Yes, he's one of the smartest monsters that ever lived. Yes, you can commonly find him fooling around in the toy aisle of the supermarket.

Asgore asked Gaster to retake the position of Royal Scientist, but Gaster declined. The role remains empty, with some discussions of putting a human in the role to help with relations. Gaster doesn't like the idea but he's willing to go along with it so long as it's a good human.

In the light of the Amalgamates, Toriel has forbidden research into Determination. Gaster does it anyways. However, he has not directly researched the Amalgamates themselves; though he would look into it if asked by Asgore, Alphys, or one of them.

Other than that, Gaster just lives on a day to day basis, trying to protect the people he loves and do the right thing.

[theskyexists]

The last graduate reread

It's crazy. People just RUN. You save yourself or it's over. Damn

Does El seriously not realise that if she just got her head out of her ass and told any enclave: I can kill every mal ever ever ever if you just give me the mana... But no

It's something that the scholomance is trying to teach her now. It realised she's got a weakness for poor freshmen lol

But hold on if El got jumped 5 times a week, then how the heck has she never shown off her killing prowess???

She NEVER asks Orion for mana. And he's so unbelievably dumb that he never even offers it

Once again, the last graduate sets the scholomance up as the largest mal ever - perfectly. El literally thinks: it feeds on us. Yet.

Honestly ...I think Orion DOES like Chloe a bit. He likes them all well enough. They're alright. They just don't interest him.

She just killed a whole pack of leskits.

She could have absolutely saved a couple of those 600 kids that died anyway. If she'd had the SENSE to get a power sharer

There were two silly parts in here that I disliked. The plans that went nope. The honeypot plan in original form that went nowhere. And yknow the whole graduation plan.

Was the scholomance trying to get Orion to slow down on his eating too?

I am pretty damn sad that Chloe got such a limited role in the golden enclaves. She's their ALLY. Why wasn't she there for any of it???

Yeah. Why CAN Orion see El? It IS probably because she's a third level entity.

Mana mana mana. Can't find enough mana to do a major working. Ok but. Orion is right there. He's right there. He WILL BE right there in the graduation hall. So. Endless mana.

Yeah this was the disappointing honepot setup. Their first experiment with the lute worked just about. Rework the melody.

Sludging acid that can burn through flesh and bone. It's like she doesn't even see that that might be USEFUL ON MALS???

Last time i also thought this spell was insane. Insane. It took a minute. It took no mana. Its free mana building. All it takes is common selfless purpose. healing. And they never use it again. She could have used it on any one person bleeding out or dying of one or the other mal poison or wound. Like.

Wait... Orion could SEE Cora when she got healed by circle

Wait... Is it because she's pure mana? No. He'd be able to see liu. Its because she's so powerful. So that IS why. Third order entity, thus has crisp edges for a mawmouth

Orion doesn't want the sharer because then he'd suck it dry.

El complaining aboutbrewing instant kill poisons. El...you can throw them...at Mals. You can trade them..... To be thrown at mals....

I would actually bet that the Scholomance has been funneling mals at El before, it was just never so obvious before, and matched to her abilities. Or not.... Did she just run everytime she got jumped? Probably ....

El says ' i understood him perfectly' but she didn't understand him there at all lol

Holy SHIT. Liesel tripped El so bad just before the mortal flame it's basically a fucking murder attempt. What the FUCK. She goddamn well gave you important information too

Ah. Right. She regretted hurting her that bad.

Amazing cake metaphors for Liesel's stunning cleavage lips and hair ensemble that Orion has zero interest in.

AND THEN THEY KISS!!!!!!! great kissing scene

That line I'll never forget it. That there's nothing much more dangerous than a fully grown wizard. Yeah. What if they didn't have to fight for their lives endlessly. What would become of humanity then...

She only realised now, now that freaking khamis did it, that SHE could do it. My god.

El is convinced Orion wouldn't survive. Which is stupid and hilarious in retrospect..he WILL survive

He just won't be able to protect people much. After all he couldn't get at Ellen in time

So the scholomance set up a situation to get El to see she will have to get everybody out. Then threw a course at them that only she can help teams get through

ALFIE!!!!! still so friendly lol

Liesel, a woman after El's own heart.

The Marathi group who traded their spellbook to Jaipur for enclave building spells instantly imploded after getting them. Well now we know why. Some moralists among them

It does also say here that you can purge your own mana. Why doesn't every fucking wizard do that oh my GOD. That's a bad loophole you shouldn't have put in novik

She literally describes the use of a mal binding spell then goes urgh but it was useless. El....you didn't have to keep it... Didn't have to feed it human corpses....just direct it into the void....

El still pessimistically interpreting the scholomance.

El not telling anyone she's gonna save em all.

WHY???? ARE YOU AN IDIOT

I guess the scholomance feels the same

Oh right. This was the moment even the book admitted: El desperately needs help because she can never spit a single thing out that would help everyone

Wow I suddenly love khamis. For finally having a go at El.

Yeah the scholomance made her the enclaver in a group of thousands. But now she's got to live with being that, everybody having to say yes to her stupid plan or die

Edit: kind of hilarious that Liesel was looking like some sort of super attractive vogue model scholomance equivalent and Orion didn't even notice which somehow triggered El into going for it with him. I need a fanfic of that exact scene again with them as highly accomplished adults. Like. El (Killer of Mawmouths) takes Liesel along (Domina of London and Manager of the Mawmouth Extermination Program) into the new Scholomance to visit Orion (Guardian of the Scholomance) and Liesel looks stunning and El looks beautiful naturally but yknow like a hippie nomad who never had the chance to learn how to dress. And somehow you get the same dynamic where El notices how amazing Liesel looks and how Orion doesn't notice at all. And Liesel rolls her eyes at El like, duh. And it again triggers El and Orion making out. Lolololol (because that IS flattering right? And also Liesel IS an aphrodisiac alsjdodjeoddjdjliaks).

[ooccoo]

And what of the glowing beyond that is so bright that those who grind the faces of the poor say it is a dream? It is no dream, it is the real, stripped of brain-distortions materialized into thrones and scaffolds, miters and guns. It is nature acting on her own interior laws as in all her other associations. It is a return to first principles; for were not the land, the water, the light, all free before governments took shape and form? In this free state we will again forget to think of these things as “property.” It is real, for we, as a race, are growing up to it. The idea of less restriction and more liberty, and a confiding trust that nature is equal to her work, is permeating all modern thought. From the dark years—not so long gone by—when it was generally believed that man’s soul was totally depraved and every human impulse bad; when every action, every thought and every emotion was controlled and restricted; when the human frame, diseased, was bled, dosed, suffocated and kept as far from nature’s remedies as possible; when the mind was seized upon and distorted before it had time to evolve a natural thought—from those days to these years the progress of this idea has been swift and steady. It is becoming more and more apparent that in every way we are “governed best where we are governed least.”

Still unsatisfied perhaps, the inquirer seeks for details, for ways and means, and whys and wherefores. How will we go on like human beings—eating and sleeping, working and loving, exchanging and dealing—without government? So used have we become to “organized authority” in every department of life that ordinarily we cannot conceive of the most common-place avocations being carried on without their interference and “protection.” But anarchism is not compelled to outline a complete organization of a free society. To do so with any assumption of authority would be to place another barrier in the way of coming generations. The best thought of today may become the useless vagary of tomorrow, and to crystallize it into a creed is to make it unwieldy. We judge from experience that man is a gregarious animal, and instinctively affiliates with his kind—co-operates, unites in groups, works to better advantage combined with his fellow men than when alone. This would point to the formation of co-operative communities, of which our present trades-unions are embryonic patterns. Each branch of industry will no doubt have its own organization, regulations, leaders, etc.; it will institute methods of direct communication with every member of that industrial branch in the world, and establish equitable relations with all other branches. There would probably be conventions of industry which delegates would attend, and where they would transact such business as was necessary, adjourn and from that moment be delegates no longer, but simply members of a group. To remain permanent members of a continuous congress would be to establish a power that is certain sooner or later to be abused. No great, central power, like a congress consisting of men who know nothing of their constituents’ trades, interests, rights or duties, would be over the various organizations or groups; nor would they employ sheriffs, policemen, courts or jailers to enforce the conclusions arrived at while in session. The members of groups might profit by the knowledge gained through mutual interchange of thought afforded by conventions if they choose, but they will not be compelled to do so by any outside force. Vested rights, privileges, charters, title deeds, upheld by all the paraphernalia of government—the visible symbol of power—such as prison, scaffold and armies, will have no existence. There can be no privileges bought or sold, and the transaction kept sacred at the point of the bayonet. Every man will stand on an equal footing with his brother in the race of life, and neither chains of economic thralldom nor menial drags of superstition shall handicap the one to the advantage of the other. Property will lose a certain attribute which sanctifies it now. The absolute ownership of it—“the right to use or abuse”—will be abolished, and possession, use, will be the only title. It will be seen how impossible it would be for one person to “own” a million acres of land, without a title deed, backed by a government ready to protect the title at all hazards, even to the loss of thousands of lives. He could not use the million acres himself, nor could he wrest from its depths the possible resources it contains. People have become so used to seeing the evidences of authority on every hand that most of them honestly believe that they would go utterly to the bad if it were not for the policeman’s club or the soldier’s bayonet. But the anarchist says, “Remove these evidences of brute force, and let man feel the revivifying influences of self-responsibility and self-control, and see how we will respond to these better influences."

-- Lucy E. Parsons, "The Principles of Anarchism"

[scentedchildnacho]

I asked him if he had a spouse and children so he asked about me and I explained what I think I know though I suspect a law group does know the facts of my case.......

I told him I didn't want a job because the slow be sedentary of indigenous policy drives me crazy to fight or flight responses and fight responses are too unpleasant for me to try

I get attacked a lot by other chicks mostly and having to be a bad girl at another chick is just too karmically awful for me

I do want to work that's why I don't job

I already did a lot of be better business punishments then resistence and also......protest then more theory learning about disease phobia so I pretend I may be a part of reality not the fake world of sex image

There is like an economy and gnp and lifi not just wifi and digitization so on a management level there are financials going around all over the place yet they claim they can justify a formality of tangible exchange and touch between people who are really phobic of disease so if it's going to be bully intransigent then I don't or

Truth is I don't want to be a bitch bully so I don't get a job because it's not sexy and they think their sexy doing it and will have to go through reality checks

Consciousness can get like submerged.....or partially catatonic asleep and eventually good people come for everybody with look those were loans and actually your moral was elsewhere....

The Crow why won't the bitch go home and cook eggs only for her care in life

Why would a woman be told she has to be objective to be an economic though....

He asked me if I would do missions so I told him I suspect i have a christian with health strength and affluence who was suppose to do a mission for me and stalks me to serve their obligation....I'm really not strong enough for creationism or flannery o Connor...i probably do have a christian though that steals a lot from me....

Otherwise I think my case is like black men eventually a law group will mass mediatize my innocence and people will stop being allowed to slander me and random miracle the whole idea of hood will just not allow any of this activity any more

The intelligentsia keeps reminding people that people are human and so an actual real activity will start at some point.....

You think their can't be a miracle like all bullshit over and common wealth re established but eventually this is just corrupt is constantly confessed

Ultimate reality of chicks in jobs is they wish someone like me ripped up with knives and left on the side of the road so eventually some homeless will terrorize and leave them knifed up on the side of the road so I run away all the time from people who won't commit to resolutions surrounding rawanda

That's been my experience of karma things wished on me happen to people who wish them so I always wish everybody correct conditions

He asked me if I beg for money so I said I San Diego I really don't have any friends and the cult here scares me so bad I recommend to others to never ever ask that people for money....

The situation appears to really really harm and terrorize the people here so if it's not just quickly and freely given then they don't ever want that business owner given anything or he attacks them

Its been my experience that if their promotion was going well they would just give things without being asked to....

Otherwise people who riot to finally force car tels to realize that things were not just given to them they have to share not just theirs is for people much stronger then me....be careful of everyone even nice mother's it's a very very corrupt condition

He warned me that he does want a strong woman and thats his apology about candice the bartender those drugs didnt want one.....

He said if spousal he is very analytical and takes resumes so i said i think my story is esoteric czech emigration....this is all i do till i marry then thats all i do.....

I think that there was a divination that i will be saved from the animal barbarous kingdom to go to marriage.......but if you ask me im like my mother and they will send me to a religious type of man.....

Ive thought about how strictly dogmatic I'm kept and eventually i will be sent away....

[pazodetrasalba]

φαρμακός

Dear Caroline:

The Greek word I use as the heading for this post is a really fascinating one, with many related but very distinct meanings: in its origins, it was  a ritualistic sacrifice or exile of a human scapegoat. Morphed into φάρμακον, it acquired the meanings of drug, poison, spell, medicine. These latter meanings are not that far away in Classical medicine, as a common belief (one rather close to homeopathy, btw) that what hurts you has the capacity to heal you; it's a question of dosage as well.

As to drugs and their consumption, I've always been very conservative and deontological, although I recognize this is a slippery slope. Some noxious substances, like tobacco and alcohol, are allowed because they have become culturally untouchable, and enforcement of prohibition is counterproductive. I haven't done the research, but I am pretty sure that some illegal substances, like cannabis or LSD are actually less bad and less addictive than the former. For LSD I remember reading a book at uni by its discoverer, doctor Hofmann and becoming genuinely interested in the aesthetic and mind-expanding potential of hallucinogenic drugs and rituals, like those associated with shamanism and 'voyages of the soul'.

There is a point to following rules though, even when they are arbitrary and even manifestly wrong, iff one could still justify the advantages they generate - this is after all the case rule-based utilitarianism makes for following rules. With drugs, familiarity and recklessness with some is suspected to lead to experimenting with harsher and more dangerous stuff, although again, these are common truthisms that would need to be tested and verified. I am pretty sure there is already substantive evidence, whether in favor or against.

In your case, adderall -of whose existence I learning through the whole FTX story- was part of the necessary ingredients in the forging of lurid media stories meant to transform an economic misstep -and some fraud- into the classical drug-and-sex scenarios of debauchery for youngsters - the FTX translation being from standard rock and roll stars to millionaire millennial nerds. These were self-evidently false and stupid, but I fear they have become truthisms of their own in the popular memory of this sad situation. I doubt long-term consumption of adderall, which I think is a type of amphetamine, can be healthy, but it doesn't seem to be addictive, and any uses you might have made of it were probably pragmatic, as a function of keeping focus in the gruelling, long works hours that you became used to. Still, while reading about some of the risk factors for its misuse, I feel that 'basing one's self-worth on external validation and low self-efficacy' feel like food for thought.

Quote:

According to other reports in Euripides' lost play about Telephus, he went to Aulis pretending to be a beggar and asked Achilles to heal his wound. Achilles refused, claiming to have no medical knowledge. Alternatively, Telephus held Orestes for ransom, the ransom being Achilles' aid in healing the wound. Odysseus reasoned that the spear had inflicted the wound; therefore, the spear must be able to heal it. Pieces of the spear were scraped off onto the wound and Telephus was healed

[qu-film-history-to-1968]

How advancing technology and time periods caused Hollywood to lose its authenticity. (Franco Morgante)

Hollywood has gone through many changes over the years. Styles like film noir, westerns, or torture porn once saw great success only to become incredibly niche or forgotten by many film goers. However some things that will never go away are the bedrock genres of the industry like horror and comedy. But even those genres have gone through massive changes and modern films in those genres feel very different from the films of the past. Two examples of this phenomenon are Nosferatu and The Great Dictator.

Nosferatu is a German expressionist film, one of the first horror films. It follows a man named Thomas Hutter who travels to Transylvania to meet a man named Count Orlok who looks to buy the house across from him. But Hutter finds out that Orlok is a vampire who wants to drink the blood of his wife, and the film turns into a mad chase to see if Hutter can save his wife from the fangs of Count Orlok. With this film being very low budget and the technology being very primitive, the film crew had to get very creative for the scares in this film. The film relies heavily on its creepy set design and shadows to make Nosferatu as unsettling as he is. Probably the best example is the iconic shot where Nosferatu is walking up the stairs, but only his shadow is visible on screen causing to appear much larger than he is. It's a testament to this creativity that even amongst all of the other vampire stories out there, Nosferatu is one of the few that is considered on the same level as Count Dracula. A quote from the film society of lincoln center summarizes this film perfectly by saying “ I am going to argue that in nosferatu we have one of the cinema's finest and most powerfully suggestive embodiments of what I call the "Descent myth" - one of those universal myths that seem fundamental to human experience” (Film Society of Lincoln Center). So, while Nosferatu might seem basic by today's standards, its clever camera tricks, good set design, and memorable main villain has made it amongst one of the most respected films in the horror genre.

In contrast, a modern example of what has been lost in horror films can be seen with the new It remakes. While they are enjoyable in their own right, most of the scares in the film felt like they all had the same structure. A character would slowly approach a dark area, the music would go silent, and then Pennywise or some form of him would jump out and chase the characters. While they are good at creating some quick jump scares, I feel like they didn’t stick with me like some of the scenes in Nosferatu. I feel like this is because modern filmmakers have the luxury of CGI, so they could show exactly what they imagined, and they don’t have to rely on clever camera tricks or use of shadows to make their monster feel scary. Granted this can mostly be attributed to the technology of films getting more advanced, but I feel like with the continued use of digital monsters instead of practical monsters, it causes modern horror films to feel less authentic than some of the older ones.

Moving to a different genre, The Great Dictator is a comedy film starring Charlie Chaplin who plays both a parody version of Hitler as well as a Jewish barber in a ghetto. The main goal of the film is meant to satirize the Nazis by portraying them as over the top bad guys that have way too much power. This is because this film was made as a propaganda film meant to make people hate the Nazis. A quote from the Hollywood Quarterly shows how films like this were integral to gain support of the war effort, they write “The motion picture can help the people of the world to share and understand one another's viewpoints, customs, and ways of living; it can in- terpret the common needs and hopes of all peoples everywhere” (Jones). Since this is a satire, much of the film's comedy comes from making the nazi’s look like buffoons, there is a scene where the dictator Adenoid Hynkel is giving a speech to his followers, and at one point he is yelling into the microphone so much that it bends backwards away from him, as if it couldn’t take Hynkel yelling anymore. In fact much of the film’s humor comes from slapstick comedy, as the scenes where the jewish barber is trying to get away from the Nazi soldiers feature physical gags that wouldn’t be out of place in a looney tunes cartoon. It shows the creativity of Charlie Chaplin as he was able to make a group as terrible as the Nazi’s into a complete joke in this film.

Nowadays modern parody films don’t have the same level of creativity as say Chaplin’s films. A lot of them mainly focus on parodying film genres, and much of the humor comes from making raunchy jokes or pointing out how dumb the cliches of a certain genre is. A modern example would be with the Scary Movie franchise, as much of the humor is built around references to other slasher movies. It causes the film’s humor to feel more dated as the humor is centered around multiple franchises that had new installments in over a decade. To me it shows how modern parody films are more about trying to write jokes that are funny in the current time period, rather than humor that can be enjoyed by people of any time period. Chaplin’s humor is timeless because a lot of it centers around clever physical gags and you don’t need to be a history major in order to get the jokes. Leading it to be a timeless comedy that is still praised to this day.

Overall, I’d say that two major things that are lost in Hollywood are creative horror and parody films. Due to the advancements in technology, filmmakers aren’t as incentivised to try and use different camera tricks or unique lighting to make their films scary like in Nosferatu. And with the heavy emphasis on reference humor in modern parody films, it leads them feeling more dated unlike The Great Dictator. While this doesn’t mean that there aren’t good examples of modern horror or parody films, when looking back at some of the older films from these two genres, it's clear that they aren’t the same as they once were.

Sources:

Hollywood Quarterly, Oct. 1945, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Oct. 1945), pp. 1-19

Film Comment, MAY-JUNE 1976, Vol. 12, No. 3 (MAY-JUNE 1976), pp. 5-9

[project1939]

Day 91- Film: The Bad and the Beautiful 

Release date: December 25th, 1952. 

Studio: MGM 

Genre: Drama 

Director: Vincente Minnelli 

Producer: John Houseman 

Actors: Lana Turner, Kurt Douglas, Walter Pidgeon, Dick Powell, Barry Sullivan, Gloria Grahame 

Plot Summary: Johnathan Shields is a notorious Hollywood film producer known for making award winning pictures and betraying almost everyone he works with. After going bankrupt when he shelves an expensive epic, he reaches out to a famous director, actor, and writer, hoping to lure them into working with him on a new project. But they all hate his guts. 

My Rating (out of five stars): ****

If you like the Classical Hollywood era, and if you have a lot of knowledge of its history, especially, you’ll really enjoy this film. Even if you don’t know that much about the era, the film stands on its own as a well-made drama and character study. 

The Good: 

Minelli’s visuals. Vincente Minnelli’s films always look beautiful, no matter how good or bad they ultimately are. He uses space and camera movement in eye-catching, interesting, and pleasing ways. He’s one of those directors where “every shot can be a painting.” That was definitely true here. 

The peek behind the curtain of Classical Hollywood. Of course, this is still a movie, so the peek we get is still a filtered one, but it certainly doesn’t glamourize filmmaking of the time. It’s not entirely cynical, but you do see some of the dark side of the industry. You also just get a cool sense of what a film set might have been like. 

The scene where characters are walking through a Hollywood party. I loved this- I even got a little chill thinking this is probably as close to a portrayal as you’ll get of one. Minnelli would have known well what the experience of going to one was like. 

 Guessing about all the inside references. David O. Selznick is the first one mentioned when people wonder who Johnathan Shields represented, but those involved with the production admit it was an amalgam of other producers too. People also like to guess about some of the directors and other behind the scenes people. Were certain characters based on certain people? It’s fun to consider. 

The way things weren’t overly romanticized. This wasn’t an entirely bleak film that excoriated Hollywood the way Sunset Boulevard did, but it also wasn’t the kind of movie where you walk away thinking, “Gee, Hollywood seems like such a nice beautiful place!” The large dose of reality was commendable for something made in 1952. 

The three main characters Shields is trying to woo back cannot stand him, thinking he ruined their lives. But it is brought up several times that all three have gone on to have huge success in spite of the betrayals. I liked the complexity of that. 

The writing was good. There was much witty or pithy quotable dialogue that I enjoyed. It wasn’t a perfectly written film, but it was often smart. 

I liked the structure. We get three basically separate stories that fall under the same over-arching plot and theme. 

Kirk Douglas. I thought he was really good in this, as he usually is. You can understand why people fell under Shields' charms, making the betrayals hurt more. Douglas plays the role fully understanding that Shields was not all bad or all evil. He was a complicated human being. Still one you’d probably call an a-hole, but complicated. 

Mrs. Cleaver! Barbara Billingsley, who played the mom on Leave it to Beaver, had a small role as a costume lady. I loved that her whole demeanor was different than the housewife she played on TV. 

All the MGM character actors! If you know and love MGM, you’ll recognize A LOT of their contract character actors. 

Walter Pidgeon. I always like him in things, especially as he got older. He’s perfect for the role of an elder-stateman. 

The film was never boring. It was 2 full hours, which wasn’t common back then, but the time flew by. 

The Bad: 

I still don’t love Lana Turner. Maybe it’s because I’m not a straight man, but I just don’t understand her appeal. She’s beautiful, but not outrageously so. She’s also just a barely competent actress, in my opinion. No disrespect meant. I think some of her appeal to men is similar to the Marilyn Monroe thing- she has lots of sexual energy but also a "lost little girl who needs saving” kind of vibe. 

I felt the writer’s story was the least compelling. I liked Dick Powell in this, so it wasn’t his fault. It was the script really, I think. 

I’m not sure how I feel about the very last scene. I generally enjoy ambiguity, but I kind of wanted them to all stick to their guns and say, “Fu-k off, Shields!” 

[ulfwolf]

Samsara -- Musing 302

I am not trying   to build a life— I am trying   to exit one

Even the sweetest   touch of Samsara is nothing but a   Nightmare

Samsara is variously defined as the world of illusion, as the world of suffering, and perhaps, these days, as the world of fake news?

The Buddha held, rightly I firmly believe, that life is Dukkha.

This word, Dukkha, is Pali for, what is the most common translation, “suffering”. Now, these days it is probably politically incorrect, or religiously incorrect, or something-or-otherly incorrect to just come out and say that “Life is Suffering,” but I don’t think that the Buddha much cared (or cares, if he still looks down on us from the Tusita heaven) to avoid hurting feelings.

I think that for the Buddha, “suffering” would be a mild, almost wimpy, rendering of what he actually meant.

Yes, I believe that Gotama Buddha did mean suffering, that he meant painful, deep, lasting agony, anguish, distress, misery, torment, torture, pick your synonym of choice.

He saw life for what it actually was/is and he called a spade a spade.

Not so these days for suffering, torment doesn’t go so well with the mellower view that life isn’t all that bad, not really, there is much good to be had here, and hadn’t we better tone the Buddha down a notch or two? Perhaps, “life can be, at times, not entirely satisfactory,” or, as one guru keeps insisting, “life can be stressful”.

I’d say.

It really depends on from what layer of understanding you view this Earthly, human (and nonhuman alike, for animals are not spared: it’s all eat or be eaten around here—a zero-sum game if I ever saw one) life. From the Buddha’s enlightened view, and he was firm, life is suffering, torment, agony, no need to pussyfoot around that fact.

Yes, while there are pleasant, some will say pleasurable, sensations and emotions here and there, even those (if you take a good look) are suffering. Even such highly rated and sought-after sensations as sexual orgasms or, for that matter, the ethereal flight of a beautiful piece of classical music, are nothing but prison wall decorations, and if you buy them (which humans, as a rule, do, you’re also buying the wall and with that also the prison itself, i.e., life as we know it here on planet Earth.

Obviously, this is an unpopular view: dark, defeatist, pessimistic, fatalistic, what have you. But this only if you cannot see beyond the prison wall and the prison itself.

Another angle: Peter Englund’s “The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War”. This amazingly well-researched and, yes, very intimate (told from the view of twenty or so individuals who lived, and died, this war) story, lays life out in front of you, and it is not pretty.

This, the “Great War”, has nothing great about it. It was a four-year abomination, an actual hell. No two ways about that. Buy the book and take a look for yourself.

Then, there’s the sequel, with the Holocaust along with Hiroshima, and yes this is what humanity is capable of. The only tangible improvement of the Second World War over its predecessor was that people died a little quicker—better weapons. And probably better medics; they knew how to stuff the drooping intestines back into the shot-asunder soldiers as they screamed for more painkillers or even death itself.

We’ve been busy brushing this under the carpet ever since, even to the insane degree of making heroes out of the best killers and then creating an avalanche of hi-res video games where killing is the best thing on earth; much like we’re brushing under the same carpet the current right-wing insanities and terrifying wars while admiring (applauding) the prison wall decorations.

It does irk me that too many Buddhist teachers and gurus do pussyfoot around the plain misery that is this life—at least on this planet.

Yes, this planet. Sometimes I seriously think that planet earth is an experiment gone drastically wrong and I think the Buddha saw that and tried to wake people up to that fact—he still is.

Just saying.

::

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