#sorry for using footnotes in my tumblr post

[batmanshole]

i hate j*yroy cause no one who likes that ship is normal about addicts.¹ jason coming from a low income family with an addict mother and roy being a heroin addict² combined with fandom-y takes and the Yaoification Beam is a recipe for awful takes on poverty and addiction. i dont think people are normal about these two SEPARATELY let alone when the main focus is ignoring their actual characterizations in favour of shipping.

¹i also hate j*yroy on account of the character assasination and shit writing and misogyny but ive talked about that one billion times.

²yes i know he was an alcoholic in n52 when most of his interactions with jason took place. but here's the thing. that was a shit retcon by a shit writer and erases a lot of history with roy.

[1moreff-creator]

Corrigendum - Literature Girl Insane Analysis

Updates After CH2 PT2

More than a year ago, the entire DRDT fandom was thrown on its head when the Literature Girl Insane David MV dropped. And with the help of DRDT Tumblr for mystery finding and interpretations, about a year ago I made “A Full Vivisection of the David MV,” a two and a half hour video going over everything I could. While I still think the video mostly holds up even after CH2 PT2, there’s quite a few things that require an update. Let’s go over them, shall we?

(Is this a correct use of the word "corrigendum"? I don't know, but it's close enough for me to use given the connection to the book theme we got going on :v)

As a warning, though, this post will more or less assume that you’ve watched Vivisection, as some sections might be complete gibberish without the context of my previous interpretations of this thing.

Spoilers up to CH2. CW: Suicide, murder, hanging, CH2 execution, gun violence, blood

I’ll go through the recontextualizations in order of appearance in the MV, though first: 

Footnote 14 Solution, Tally 5 Correction

So these two things aren’t related to Part 2, but instead codes already in LGI. Since Vivisection came out, the footnote 14/Roman numeral I code got solved, and I’ve been informed that the solution for tally 5 I hinted at in the video was, while not wrong in the sense that you could arrive at the code using it, not the actually intended solution. Basically I said to pay attention to line breaks, when you’re actually supposed to ignore them, and that meant that one character had to be ignored when in reality the real solution works perfectly fine without ignoring it. Sorry, the line break thing was just commonly repeated advice given on Tumblr at the time and I don’t know why I never double checked how accurate it was :v

The proper solutions can be found in my Secrets Masterpost, so I won’t repeat them here. The Roman numeral I code, attached to Xander via crosswords, returned “I have always looked up to you,” which is perfectly in line with both the things David states in 2-12 and the conclusions drawn about how he feels towards Xander from the MV. As for tally 5, that will be addressed later. 

Yoidore Shirazu Lyrics

Another thing that happened was the release of the Elliot MV, Yoidore Shirazu. While the MV itself is not particularly for our purposes, I'm bringing it up to double check a thing with the lyrics.

You might remember that a big chunk of Vivisection was informed by "Language Theory," the idea that some lyrics' translations were specifically changed to fit better with David. This was supported by footnote 5, "As the translation has been intentionally botched in many parts, it should not be considered accurate," as well as the fact that Coleena Wu was listed in the credits, meaning her translation was used as a base for the David MV even though there were many differences between the David MV's lyrics and her version.

Thus, when I saw that Yoidore Shirazu credited Magenetra for the English lyrics, I figured I'd check if it happened again. And yes, there are a few lines here and there where the Elliot version is slightly different from the original translation. While I won't get into all of them in this post, a particularly notable change is "my muddy, obstructed and broken vision of the future, it's not half bad" in the original changing to "my muddy, obstructed, broken future, it's not half bad" in the Elliot MV, for example.

What does this tell us about the David MV? Well, I would argue that if dev decided to change a few lyrics in an MV where word placement isn't as important as in LGI, presumably just to make them fit better with Elliot or because dev just prefers certain wording (I don't see any other reasons the translation would be different), then it's very possible that they also consciously changed a few LGI lines to fit better with David. Maybe. In other words, I believe this is an extra argument to the validity of Language Theory, though I could also see it as an argument against ("maybe dev just doesn't care about sticking so close to the translations they use") :v

Now let’s actually go from the start of the MV to the end, shall we?

Color Connection Theory: Orange

In Vivisection, I said (words more words less) that while in a vacuum orange would probably go to Ace, the context of some of the lines seemed to fit Xander better, with the argument that the trailer for the series assigns orange as the color of the first letter of Xander’s name in a hypothetical class trial. The main argument was that Orange “that guy” appeared next to Green “this guy” (Hu/Teruko, leaning Hu) and Black “you” (possibly Mai), and lumping Ace in with characters who seemed much more important than him at the time seemed… strange.

Since then, Ace has gained a notable amount of importance to this particular part of the story, given the whole blackened thing. As a result, I would argue his inclusion as Orange is now more likely than Xander’s. Take a look at the start of the first chorus, for example, and you’ll see that putting Xander as red (which would be redundant if he’s also orange) makes for a nice, neat reading in the context of this trial.

[Literature Girl Insane] Even if you cry, make noise, shout, go mad the world won’t change!

Arei: “Even if you cry about hurting Eden, you’ll still always be a horrible person.”

Hu: “Even if you make noise to make yourself useful, you’re still the same hopeless child who attempted suicide three times.”

Ace: “Even if you shout, you’ll always be a coward.”

Xander: “Even if you go mad, you’ll always be a good person at heart.”

“No matter what, you people (the world) won’t change.”

What a lovely worldview David has! 

There’s also this instance, "let's play!":

[Literature Girl Insane] With anonymous hopes let's play!

Which makes sense given Ace is “playing the killing game” by… killing in the game. Foreshadowing or am I insane? These are not mutually exclusive. 

Hand Holding

dev why /affectionate

So, yeah. Arei holds David’s hand the same way Ideal Country Woman does. At least we’ve got near 100% confirmation that the weird line of white pixels is not a glove or anything, but rather a bend of the wrist as expected. 

Now we have to ask what Arei’s connection to this mess is. Thankfully, I can at least draw a connection between Arei and the surrounding context of the scene, so we’re not going in completely blind. As a reminder, here’s the interpretation I arrived at for the “tunnel scene” that directly precedes Miss Hand Holding’s appearance.

[Extract from Vivisection] David gives Xander the order to "escape the tunnel," so open himself up to love others. However, "but," loving David is a bad idea, because he's a monster who's better off dead. His opinion, right? So he asks himself, where should Xander escape? "Where to?" In other words, who should Xander like and be friends with?

The connection to Arei should be more or less clear, provided you replace Xander's name with her. There’s two ways to take it. Arei opened herself up to David, “escaped the tunnel on his direction” per say. And given what happened directly after, you could say it led to a “disastrous scene.” Alternatively, if David genuinely wanted to accept Arei’s proposal to be “less shitty together,” if he “escaped the tunnel in Arei’s direction,” that too could be considered a “disastrous scene” because Arei died. That one’s admittedly a pretty big if, butconsidering some of the stuff David says…

David [2-10]: Unless, of course, you were Arei. That girl wanted desperately to prove herself as a "friend" to Eden. And yet she completely lacked any experience with what "friends" were actually like. [...] What could she know about "friendship," after all? Someone like her, who had not once experienced kindness in her entire life up until now? [...] [Breaking down] It's... It's so... Ahaha. It's just so foolish. For someone to take advantage of Arei like that... It's absolutely unforgivable. All she wanted was to change. What a reprehensible person this killer is. I look forward to seeing their painful execution.

Yeah he might have cared. 

So, okay, Arei can be connected to the surrounding context so this isn’t completely out of left field, but we still have the possibility of a further connection to the Mystery Girl. As you might recall, this girl is either Diana Chiem (based on certain similarities with David and because revealing Ms Naegi like this would be weird) or Ms Naegi (because Diana isn’t in the Cast List, while Naegi is). I don’t see any immediate connections to Naegi, so we’re left with Diana, who also has little connection.

Of course, the number one takeaway is that Arei reminds David of Diana (or Ms Naegi) in some way, so we can infer Mystery Girl might have supported David despite knowing about his manipulative nature, especially possible since she's positioned in the MV in a way where she's the "(so-called) ideal country." I'm about to ramble a whole lot more about other possibilities, but this is probably what we're meant to get from this.

If we’re allowing a small amount of unhingedness, another connection that could be drawn is between Arei’s family situation and David’s. Arei also had sisters, but they treated her horribly until Arei ruined their lives. Translated to Diana, this could mean that David treated her badly, that she did something to harm him, or both. If their relationship turned bad during Hope’s Peak time, it could explain why Footnote David, presumed to be David before losing his memories, claims she doesn’t exist, when Killing Game David speaks about her openly. Did he try to cut ties with her or something, and tries to pretend she doesn’t exist? Again, unhinged and probably not what the takeaway is meant to be, but we know less than zero about Diana, so it's not impossible.

Alternatively, though, it's worth noting that Mystery Girl and Arei tilt their heads in opposite directions, which could symbolize they're opposites in a way. Taken with the previous interpretations, this could mean either Mystery Girl supported David without knowing about his motive secret (opposite of interpretation 1), or that Arei's family situation is opposite Diana's, aka David had a good relationship with his sister (opposite of interpretation 2).

But speaking of insane, would you believe me if I told you that this visual similarity could, alternatively, be evidence for literally the most unhinged theory in the entire Vivisection? That is, the ridiculous deduction which is arrived at by analyzing the objects in the “suspicious gaps” attached to footnote 11, “I admit to lying. There is no one named OOOOO OOOOO. I am, and always have been, an only child," as well as the Catch-22 quote that comes directly after. Full explanation in Vivisection, but here’s the theory. 

[Extract from Vivisection]  So, first, I think the footnote is a double lie. David's lying about lying. He does actually have a sister but, for some reason, he's trying to deny it. He's pulling an Arturo: something happened with his sister, and he's trying to distance himself from it. That's where the snake with the blood and the safe come in, with the rope possibly implying a suicide. Remember the family history of depression? [...] So, it's possible Diana died. [...] It's also possible that whatever happened to Diana would have been hinted at in David's motive video. [...] Yeah, that's my explanation for the TV. But, why would this bad thing which happened to Diana be in David's motive video? That would imply David doesn't remember it. That's what the Snowden line could mean. [...]

Yeah remember that insane thing? Well, Arei died by hanging, so it’s possible Diana also died by hanging, aka suicide. This connection doesn’t make the theory any less unhinged, but it’s there. 

I hate the things I love, and I love the things I hate

As a refresher, this screen is about Xander, indicated mainly by the references to electrocution literally framing the scene. Nothing’s actually changed here, mind you, I just wanted to point out that it’s interesting that so far, we’ve only seen David talk about Xander with love, and we haven’t really seen the whole “I hate” part yet. Curious to see how that will develop later.

suspicious gaps

Still zero clue, I’m just putting it here because it’s still killing me.

V. Right now, why do you go insane? [Ace's numeral]

We should’ve known, guys… Ace’s numeral is literally right next to Arei’s (IV), not just in song position, but numerically. Incidentally, that means both killers so far have been in multiples of five (Min with X, Ace with V), so, uh, Whit (XV), anything you wanna tell us about CH3?

(I don’t think he’ll be the CH3 killer I’m just being silly :p)

Anyways, the big update here is related to the background text, “a cat has 9 additional lives.” This was already pointed out by treescanfly, and that is that Thanatophobia, Ace’s execution, featured 9 different execution methods (scythe - illness - fire - falling - murder - drowning - lightning - firing squad (execution)). Looks like horseboy really was a catboy all along!

XIII. or [not to be?] [Teruko's numeral]

The interpretation of the quote itself, that it’s a reference to Teruko’s suicidal tendencies, hasn’t changed. It’s only gotten more explicit.

Teruko [2-16]: Killed? I doubt it. As if something so kind could happen to me.

:(

Not much else here, though it seems Teruko might start rejecting the suffering associated with being the Omelas child given her talk with DefaultTV, so that’s fun.

Footnote 6, “[Prayer]”

So what I’m about to say is technically a connection that existed since LGI’s realease, but was just a bit too insane for me to even think about back then. 

Basically, you know how Mai is referred to as a “God” in this video, because of her numeral and the arrow? Well… what if that’s connected to this footnote? And, I don’t know, Min is praying to Mai?

Again, unhinged even for my standards, but with the confirmation that XF-Ture Tech is in some form behind the killing game… anything that puts Min in a weirdly plot relevant position (such as inexplicably having a Mai connection beyond what we saw in Bonus Episode 1) should be at least written down for posterity, if nothing else. 

That's my way of saying- Please write about Min, guys. I miss her :(

Footnote 12

“Majority rule” is known to be the fairest method of making decisions for a group. That's why murderers never complained when we voted for them to die.

In Vivisection, I primarily argued the meaning of this footnote through the lens that David may have genuinely believed he had driven Arei to suicide, and thus believed he was the blackened. This turned out to be horribly wrong, so we course correct. 

Instead, this simply seems to be what David was hoping would happen when he pulled out the magical girl transformation, albeit stylized with an impossible 16 people vote. The screen that flashes after just seems to reflect what David thinks would actually happen if a blackened won, or just what will happen by the end of the killing game no matter what: “Everyone will be executed.” That’s based on this line:

David [2-12]: 15 lives. Some of them are very dear to you. And your own life as well. Is there anything at all that could be more important to you than those 16 human lives?

Where David talks about sacrificing the full 16 lives of the participants, seemingly without taking into account that the blackened wouldn’t actually die in his plan. Because of that, it’s inferred that David doesn’t actually think the blackened would survive even if they won the trial. 

Other than that, the footnote seems to just be a direct reference to what Teruko says in the trial:

Teruko [2-15]: We determine who lives and who dies by a majority vote. In other words, the opinion of everyone who *isn't* you.

Which, uh... makes things easier, so I'm not gonna read into it much further :v

“What is the most important thing?” / Mistaken alphabet

Still no idea what these two things are about, that’s why I’m bringing them up :v

Original

[Extract from Vivisection] So, what I think is the best idea is that all the characters [referring to Color Theory] got the word. [...] I think it makes more sense to relate them to the meaning of "original style" under my interpretation, where "original style" means a change of heart.

The interpretation from Vivisection seems to hold strong, as MonoTV did actually have a “change of heart” of sorts, albeit brief. Hey we take the Ws where we can get them >:D

Two Eyed Xander

The theory discussed in Vivisection that David might hold memories from Hope’s Peak times was seemingly debunked by a tweet from the dev, even if the thread referenced in the link was later deleted. I did say in Vivisection that I didn’t believe the theory even if it was cool, so… we’re chilling. 

Of course, though, we did get confirmation that David knew about Xander before Hope's Peak, so the appearance of Xander with two eyes was meaningful! Cool!

Correct/Incorrect (Tally 5)

This is going to discuss the unlisted video linked in the footnotes of Vivisection, which I am well aware most of you probably didn’t watch given the view count. In any case, the thing I said there, which I also said in my Mai post, was that tally 5 could imply David had been involved in the weird revolution against Hope’s Peak that Xander and Mai had going on. While this is still certainly possible, given what was said in 2-12, it seems more plausible that tally 5 actually references David taking on Xander’s dream during the killing game.

David [2-12]: I don't care how low I'll sink, or how despicable I'll have to become. I'll do anything to carry on Xander's ideals by ending this killing game, even if it means I have to dirty my hands.

Yeah, the dream of killing everyone, that one. I say this not only because we know David “threw away his humanity” for it, but also because the image itself shows David holding Xander’s jacket, which would imply this is being said after Xander’s death. Thus, during the killing game. 

Numeral IX - Look, aside from that, give me the usual medicine [Levi's numeral]

Well, he sure needs medicine alright! Yeah that’s the best answer I currently have about what in the hell this numeral means, so we’re going with this. 

That said, points to Vivisection me, because the “Levi is Jupiter protecting Earth from asteroids” interpretation ended up being pretty solid. 

Clock Fork

You know, the theory that Eden was the one to rip out Xander’s eye based on the clock in LGI existed before I made Vivisection, I just… didn’t invlude it. The one unhinged theory I don’t mention ends up being true, huh? Well, there’s that. Not much else to say, if you're deep into DRDT lore you already know the implications of a bloody fork.

-

And… that’s about that! Although I had quite a few comments to make and things to add, actual corrections were few and far between, which I’m happy about! Mind you, there's probably a few Vivisection statements here and there I'm forgetting about, but still. Hope you enjoyed this little corrigendum, and if you made it this far, you deserve your own Jupiter-Levi to defend you in your time of need! See you later!

[thatdogmagic]

As before, if you don't know what's going on, and aren't up to speed on Tumblr nonsense, you are totally allowed to go do something else. It will be a much better use of your time.

So, yeah.

I know the logs going around. I know how they come off if taken at face value, from the author's 'I did nothing wrong here' point of view.

Disclaimer up front: what I'm about to say isn't excusing aggressive behaviour, or saying that everything I said is wonderful and/or justified. Even if I think HaliteaTiger et al are going out of their way to heap all their responsibility on to me, like they were just innocent babies who couldn't make decisions for themselves, I don't think anyone deserves to be in the blast radius of an autistic meltdown (required viewing), especially of the Fight variety.

Talking about that is how Haligren and I bonded, in fact. Even before I knew it was autism, we talked about our mutual issues with explosive and dissociative anger.

All this is to say, I am not going to lengthen this post even more by pausing to say, every time I defend myself, that I'm aware of my own bad behaviour. Which I know is going to rub some people the wrong way/serve as 'proof' I'm just as bad as they think, but honestly? Don't care. This post isn't for you. You've decided based on vibes-based posting and cherrypicked logs you don't like me, and that's your business. You're welcome to leave now. I haven't given you any method of knee-jerk replying to this anyway.

For everyone else, the tl;dr is this: it should strike people as odd that I am the only person taking any real responsibility for a situation so prone to blowing up (friends working together) that it regularly shows up in every sitcom known to mankind.

To me, it is the height of irony that my main detractor decided to post me saying the r-slur about myself as an indictment, when 'look at this r-slur' has been the thesis of everyone's posts ever since this started. And no, I'm sorry, they know that's exactly what they're doing.

I can say that with confidence, because each one of them was informed, very clearly, and very early on, that I, as an at-the-time 41-42 year old, was going through some serious struggles with a recent autism diagnosis. In the case of HaliteaTiger, she even ignored photographs I'd taken, physical evidence of what meltdowns could do to me in my younger years.

They know this is explicitly attached to a disability, and they're going on record saying they can't possibly believe that's the case. That I must be lying for my own benefit.

In short, that I'm too smart to be that (r-slur). I must simply be malicious, manipulative, abusive instead.

Which is exactly why the word is so easy to reach for in those moments of meltdown.

Doesn't make it right, of course-- not only should I not use the word, I should really be kinder to myself. But I have a hard time being angry with myself for repeating what people have been saying to me for pretty much my entire life, even if they're not saying it outright.

So. Let me be blunt: I am not taking responsibility for other people deciding that they can "handle me," in spite of a downpour of warnings, disclaimers, and full-blown discussions. It can only be my fault for so long that I am exactly who I say am.

What I can take responsibility for is moving too quickly. It was taking that feeling of 'oh this explains everything' that the diagnosis brought with it, and thinking that relief could translate into control. I wasn't in a rational space for how things went with HaliteaTiger - and I was as clear about that as I could have been - but in the end, I was the one who said 'yes' to working together. I was probably the one who had the idea to work together in the first place. And I genuinely thought I could handle it. Obviously, I couldn't, and I meant every apology I gave when that became evident.

(aside: since people will rightfully ask, I have footnoted why I agreed to work with Jackal/Trish in spite of saying I learned from this bad experience with Haligren; if I go into it here I'll veer off track again.)

When I say this is where my responsibilities begin and end, I'm not writing that off as a small thing. I know now that, that soon after diagnosis and reorienting my life, I was going through a kind of 'skill regression.' Whether I knew it or not - that I was effectively a loaded weapon that could go off at any time - it doesn't change the outcome. Besides that, I knew full well what I was capable of. I had years of experience telling me it was probably too soon. 'Wishful thinking,' and the myriad other reasons for poor impulse control, doesn't clear me of that. I'm not going to ask, never have asked anyone to forgive me for it, either.

That said: it is where my responsibilities begin and end.

Keep in mind, Haligren herself posted what was more or less, 'she did exactly what she said she'd do and I can't accept that maybe I had a hand in this by not bothering to listen to her. Again.'

And the same goes for Jackal, albeit to a far lesser extent. We've already covered the fables she's invented for this.

You know, I know I've said it before, but I feel like it's worth pointing out again that this is all this needed to be. 'I thought I could handle this and I couldn't' was all it needed to be, from everyone. There was and is no shame in admitting that. And admitting it to ourselves didn't need to be all bad, either. It certainly hasn't been for me.

ex: It's allowed me to set much clearer boundaries for myself and others; it's let me see a lot of weak points that need the most work; and it's allowed me to just exist more comfortably with others.

There are things outside of my control that can still trigger me, but I've gotten better at pulling back in time, and if not pulling back in time, then lessening severity. Which sucks, sometimes, because it often means pulling back from things I'd rather be doing, because they're too overstimulating. ex: I often have to stop playing flashy video games because the visuals can exacerbate any ambient tension I already have.

It's where 'ah yeah this why this is a disability' realizations come in. Having to literally lay in a dark room to get your nervous system to shut the fuck up. Which I didn't know, couldn't have guessed would be a requirement for getting my Everything to calm down, any more than I could know that certain types of treble played at higher volumes could make me start feeling panicky and fucked up. I didn't even know 'dark room + reading' would work for me until sometime this year.

With all that in mind, I've been trying to be a lot more mindful about surrounding myself with people who I know for sure know exactly what's going on. Who take it seriously, and understand that I'm still learning a lot as I go, making up for a lot of years to a point where I sometimes feel like I'm relearning how to walk, or tie my shoes. They understand that just the process of de-masking is difficult, either because they've done it or are in the process of doing it, themselves.

I will not hold it against them if they witness a meltdown and decide enough is enough. Which is part of this I don't think Haligren et al ever realized:

I don't want people around if I'm genuinely too much for them. Because, and I know this might come as a shock but, I don't want to hurt people. I never have and I never will. I don't get any kind of fulfillment out of the sound of a telephone, or some random visual overload, sending me into an absolute rage and that coming out at someone I care about. That's not cool or comfortable or fun, that's stupid. I don't get any joy or reward from that. There is nothing that has ever positively reinforced it, and until I knew what it was, every single method I could use to fix it just fell completely flat.

I've spent much of my life feeling completely hopeless about it. Which is something else Haligren and I talked about. Something she experienced herself and sympathized with (which I can say is true; funny enough, she took the reactions to some of her own random explosions and posted them as 'proof I'm just mean all the time'). I have my theories as to why I suddenly lost that sympathy - I wasn't 'fun' anymore when my struggles were real, for one - but that's for later.

Still: everything that happened between us, she already knew was possible. That it was a matter of 'when' not 'if.' That it was not me giving myself permission, it was me telling her, this is a thing I struggle with constantly, it does take a certain type of person to work this closely with me on projects I feel this strongly about.

For reasons only she can say, she decided she was that certain type of person. I did not strongarm, goad, or pressure her into that role. I did not ask 'are you sure?' in some bizarrely nuanced way that inferred she had no choice.

Example: I was in what I can recognize now as that 'pre-meltdown' state when she approached me about using Clip Studio's comics formatting. For whatever reason, I snagged on having found the tool confusing in the past and lost my fucking mind about not wanting to use it. I apologized because it was undeserved, at best random and out of nowhere.

I feel like that should have probably let her know what was going on/its severity.

I would check in (or try to check in) with her after stuff like that and I know at least once initiated the 'are you sure?' conversation about working together, if not twice, in response to not catching myself in time. Long before she let me stick my neck out publicly and announce the collab we were working on.

IDK what she thought I was saying there. With any of that. Which was another problem in and of itself but we'd be here for actual pages of text if I had to go into how many times I was willfully misinterpreted as playing 4D manipulative chess or whatever.

So, yes, to say, 'I knew it could be bad but not this bad!!' is plain bullshit. It's bullshit. She knows that. And she knows I have logs of all of it.

Here's the thing tho: I don't *want* to fucking post any logs. Not least because I don't want *my* personal business out there for everyone to see, but I frankly don't want to be known as someone who posts someone else's, esp wrt mental health. Also:

I don't want to continue a slapfight that will only lose us all friends and colleagues, and may even create fractures in the actual community.

Because, let's be clear: that's the *only* endgame here. That is the best possible outcome of all of this: we annoy our peers and our community with a mountain of shit that will only ever boil down to 'we did not work well together, for a variety of reasons, and we all got messy about it.' That is all anyone will come away with after all the logs are posted, and all the shit is slung. Because there is no tell-all beyond that. There are no juicy secrets.

If you guys ('cause I know it'll be copy/pasted to you anyway despite blocks) want to die on that hill, that's your business. I *am* genuinely sorry anyone had to sit through my meltdowns; I truly don't want to have them, ever at all for any reason, and I don't want other people around me to take the heat of them. But that's the only thing I can really apologize for beyond 'I'm sorry it didn't work out' and whatever other *actual* mistakes I made.

We all made plenty. We all lost an opportunity we wanted in each other. We all lost out on telling our own stories quicker, and on telling new ones with one another. Pointing to one of the only people willing to take any responsibility for their part, and proceeding to dump *all* responsibility on their shoulders, will not fix that. Burning me in effigy won't save you from yourselves, either, because if you can't face this, you'll have all the same problems with other people later on down the line. You just will. There's no avoiding that.

As for me, as I said, I pared down who I work with quite a bit, to people who do take me seriously, and understand - really understand - what they're signing up for. Who won't look at me saying 'I don't take hints well so please just be up front with me' and disregard it as nonsense because I'm clearly too smart for that to be a thing.

It does 1000% require being around people who are willing to talk very frankly and openly about every conflict and confrontation. Which are, it should be noted, *not* people who are pathologically driven to pat your ass and say 'it's ok it's fine' when they clearly meant something different.

...

I'm not sure anything good will come of me posting this.

When I say the posts about me have been pretty much nothing but Jackal, Trish, and Haligren saying 'look at this r-slur,' I really do mean it. People gawking and engaging are joining in to do the same. Me making this post just invites even more of that, from them and from spectators.

Nothing good has come of me staying quiet, though, so it needed to be said.

Their disbelief that I could ever be 'that bad,' their unwillingness to listen to me when I talked about my limits, when I gave clear examples of where I might need additional support... I am not taking responsibility for that disbelief, no matter how many internet randos get sicced on me. Not from Haligren and definitely not from Jackal.

So, yeah, sorry/not sorry. I know someone having a visibly 'fight' response is easy to shit on, but, nah, no. I'm not going to apologize for saying I was *owed* an apology from Haligren, either, because I was, and she knows exactly why. She's just not willing to talk about the context of that moment, because that'll take all the wind out of the 'she was abusive and lashed out for no reason!!' sails.

It'll mean taking responsibility for her part in ruining the opportunity I represented for her and her work. Which is probably an uncomfortable thought to sit with, and clearly has been for years, considering how eager she was to jump in on behalf of someone who knew ahead of time that she held a grudge.

I'm sure that'll work out well for her. I wish them well in their future collaboration. Maybe I'm wrong and absolutely none of the problems they had with me will ever surface ever again with other people ever, and everything will be fine.

ps: Going on public record to say someone who told you, more than once, 'I have no interest in you romantically' indicated they actually had a mutual crush on you is rich. 'The thought crossed my mind' =/= 'I have a crush on you too,' so we're clear. If Haligren weren't playing a game of hate-telephone with someone prone to exaggerate, she'd have known that this assumption is part of the problem I had with her.

Same w/ the constant 'I'm not into women' reminders, like I'm incapable of remembering/might fall in love with her at a moment's notice because I happen to be attracted to women and femmes. Which might just be her being awkward but like, PSA: don't do that to your queer friends, it's weird and gross to just assume that kind of thing.

Especially when, in spite of that, it felt like sometimes I was being treated as a surrogate boyfriend on an emotional level. Which is pretty much what she posted outright, so-- thanks for clarifying that for me, I guess. ;p

pps: The only reason I even considered taking a risk on working on something more intense w/ people again, re: starting up with Jackal and Trish at all, was because I got laid off from my job, had severance, and unemployment. I had a window of time I could work hard on big projects and still be pulling in income. They were both given a pretty detailed account of what had triggered them w/ Haligren and also that they had happened/would probably happen, given how new everything was.

It was still a decision I knew could easily go sideways - and tried to account for that - but took the risk anyway. I knew what I was doing, which is, yes, where I explicitly fucked up, and my way of owning that isn't something I can put on display. I can only prove it with how I act and with whom, and that's what I intend to do.

ppps: I'd say more about whatever it is Trish is going on about in all of this but she and I barely spoke personally which makes her going scorched earth honestly pretty laughable and not really worth addressing.

[philologique]

perpetually fascinated by how the thai series i've watched tend to translate vulgar intensifiers,¹ and specifically thinking about โคตร,² which i'm just gonna write as "kho:t" for the rest of this post (pronounced with an aspirated k or the 'ch' in 'loch' and an unreleased t at the end; the colon just makes the o long)

heads up that i don't actually speak thai and i'm not any kind of translator! just an english speaker with a pretty good ear who spends approximately two-thirds of all waking hours thinking about language. footnotes and stream of consciousness thoughts on ongoing phonological change(!!) in footnotes under the cut.

anyway! kho:t literally means ancestry, clan, descent, or lineage,⁷ but is used an intensifier that wiktionary describes as "slang, sometimes considered vulgar." ⁸

i think about thai intensifiers—and specifically kho:t—all the time in the context of episode 5 of bad buddy. pat's "it was so depressingly lonely for me" is the last pin you can hear drop before the dam breaks, but what he says is แม่งโคตรเหงาเลยเว่ย, (maeng kho:t ngao loey woey). which is a bit rawer? cruder? three of those five words (แม่ง,โคตร,เว่ย) are sometimes are translated as "damn," including just a few sentences earlier when pat says "while you were away, my life was so damn happy."

when i first watched bad buddy i didn't know a single sentence in thai, and i have no idea how any other choice might have hit me in that moment. but at least twice a week i wonder whether and how that translation choice might have affected the english-language bad buddy fandom. damn, it was so lonely. so damn lonely. so freaking lonely. so desperately lonely. so depressingly lonely.

of course, it was all of those things.

¹ Shout out to Methawee Yuttapongtada for their article, "Intensifier as Changed from the Impolite Word in Thai," without which it would have taken last-year-me months longer to tell what pat was saying. i was playing the audio of this scene on a loop in my brain and assumed that the velar fricative was a /kʰ/, but there are so many spelling options for word initial /kʰ/ and word final /t/ that i gave up experimenting with spellings and looked for english-language linguistic literature on thai intensifiers.

² Theoretically pronounced /kʰôːt/ but often (usually?) realized by young speakers in contemporary thai as [xôːt] or [χôːt], which is a whole other thing (that is vastly more interesting to me personally).³ ⁴ i feel like (at least gen z) speakers use a velar or uvular fricative in more or less free variation with an aspirated k, but i haven't come across any literature on it other than in descriptive studies of northern thai.⁴ ⁵ Either way kʰôːt rhymes with the "tô:t" in the thai word for sorry, which you'll probably recognize if you've watched anything in thai!

³ I know this is rough IPA lol. the unreleased diacritic looked weird on tumblr and struck me as unnecessary for phonemic transcription given that all word-final stops are unreleased. also i'm fine with just using the most commonly used latin-script tone diacritics for standard central thai. to me IPA's value is in precision and facilitating common understanding; i don't feel like any of that's lost by not using IPA tones here.

⁴ PHONETICS THOUGHTS re /kʰ/

I kinda think [kʰ], [x], and [χ] are in more or less free variation phonologically among most speakers today in all environments except before close/high front vowels—คิด is pretty much always [kʰit], and from watching a bunch of cooking shows 'salty' (เค็ม) seems to be not-quite-invariably pronounced with a [kʰ].

...but then i think boom used a fricative (possibly [ç]) when saying คิดอะไร at one point in last weekend's hidden agenda?? and 'okay' (โอเค) seems to have a fricative at least half the time i hear it. i would hazard a guess that if you did several hours of (ideally) informal linguistic interviews with central thai speakers of different ages: (1) everyone would have some velar or uvular fricatives, (2) the fricative /kʰ/ would be more common among younger speakers (vs older speakers) in all (syllable-initial) phonetic environments, (3) individual speakers would be most likely to pronounce /kʰ/ as a fricative before more open/low and back vowels and in true consonant clusters, (4) individual speakers would be least likely to pronounce /kʰ/ as a fricative before closer/higher front vowels, particularly /i/, and (5) speakers would be more likely to pronounce /kʰ/ as [kʰ] when they're paying attention to their speech, e.g. reading off a list of words in isolation—which takes us to:

SOCIOLINGUISTICS-ish THOUGHTS re /kʰ/:

I know i just talked about the phonological constraints and possible ongoing sound change for the phoneme /kʰ/ but i think it's super NOT free variation in practice, even before a vowel like /a/. this is just based on observation from contemporary dramas/cooking shows/interviews/songs (which is another thing i have Thoughts about), but i feel like at the moment it's largely a register thing that maps imperfectly onto levels of formality (and also friendliness? one hyper-specific almost-baseless hypothesis i'd like to test is that you'll hear more fricative /kʰ/ in constructions with the particle 'na' (นะ)). i would also guess that if there are any attitudinal studies on the pronunciation, they would reveal that most speakers view an aspirated stop as the "proper" way to pronounce syllable-initial /kʰ/.

i would love to look at whether /kʰ/ is realized as a fricative more or less often in constructions with certain particles, as an easy proxy for certain kinds of register. (i would also want to look at this with different first- and second-person pronouns, although so many of them are roughly gendered or would correspond to the relative age of the speaker and listener that it would almost certainly skew the results and might just tell us more about the demographics that are leading this phonological change! which is also useful!) ANYWAY if i win the lottery maybe i'll go back to linguistics for real bc i miss it desperately and want an excuse to study this 😭

re attitudinal research, I would really want to poll and have linguistic interviews with thai speakers of central thai as well as bilingual speakers of central thai and northern thai, isan/lao, and other tai and non-tai minority languages in thailand. i'm interested in questions about possible interference from those languages vs the extent to which speakers might emphasize differences between their respective minority languages and central thai (even where they may not exist) for the sake of maintaining regional/cultural identity through language (or something?? this is really poorly articulated but as an example i'm thinking about how my dialect of swiss german uses the same construction as standard german for the verb "to hurt" (Weh tun/Weh tue), but swiss german speakers think of "Weh tue" as a uniquely alemannic construction and instead use the word "schmerzen" when speaking/writing swiss standard german, effectively inventing a "german" construction that the local language can be in opposition to. see also fn 5 and 6 on northern thai below.)

⁵ Those studies note (if i recall correctly, this is off the top of my head lmao) that kʰr- consonant clusters in northern thai effectively drop the r and realize the k as a fricative.⁶ which. i'm not convinced this is uniquely part of northern thai so much as a productive phenomenon across central and northern thai that's just highly register-dependent in the standard language. (i would argue that at least the dropping of 'r's and 'l's from consonant clusters absolutely is just part of central thai phonology at this point. if being able to pronounce a consonant cluster—or a rolled r, for that matter—is a sign of ~good education or ~elocution rather than something that any subset of speakers learns as part of the spoken language when acquiring the language as children (which is possible, i just have not observed it), then—apart from the extent to which it conveys social meaning—i don't really think of it as a fundamental part of the language itself. this is maybe kind of a hot take lmao)

⁶ There was also a clip i watched—i think it was from the 1000 stars bts of khaotung trying to speak northern thai—where someone basically articulated that same rule to him, like "for ครบ just say /xop/"

⁷ From sanskrit, hence the silent r in the thai script.

⁸ I don't know nearly enough abt thai language or culture to meaningfully analyze the implications of that etymology or how โคตร might best be translated with minimal context. i'm guessing "damn" might be at about the right level of intensity/vulgarity as an intensifier, but it carries such explicit religious implications that i'm hesitant to use it?? i'm happy to let the translators and subtitlers make the difficult decisions while i just ponder stuff about sound change

[polysprachig]

Pardon me as I prepare to intrude my thoughts on language learning upon the public (again).

I’m working on taking myself less seriously and getting over what I like to call *nonsensical, self-inflicted recording stress*. Hence the one-take and post method I’m trying to experiment with on tumblr dot com in which I read and comment on my ***polyglot journal***.

WIP, unbeta’d, off-the-cuff. 🧿💙  

Transcript below (Orange = Speaking/commentary, Blue = Written commentary, White = Reading)

In the spring of 2020 I decided to write a detailed book on all of the language learning activities that I was doing. As I look here at page 27 of the book itself—it's pretty long; there are still blank pages—I can see several things. The one is a general overview, together with my own commentary about what I did wrong right from the off. 

[Reads] In which I accidentally bite off far more than I can chew, determine to do too much, establish a routine check in system and throw organization to the wind. Includes: Irish, Greek, German and Middle English; the Merlin project in its infancy, plus voca; a note on colour-coded translation exercise; a start to translating authors whose work I know; and the initial return to reading historical verse, which means, generally speaking, [whispers] Chaucer. The overwhelming theme is to consider what core vocabulary and skills I will need to accomplish the activities described, with special emphasis on trying the first ... to first rely on my own language skills in a—in an in almost Test -Teach slash Test-Check manner.

Now let's see how it starts. 

During the summer season I have decided to focus my language learning efforts on my productive skills, those being speaking, writing, translation and the creation of new materials. At the center of this decision burns the desire to spread the seeds of my knowledge of different languages to others and espouse the personality of fire to keep my learning active, invigorating, and all consuming. This trimester of learning—Yes, I can count, I just really like the word trimester (it's technically a semester) from May through to the end of August, is meant to prevent me from becoming too lethargic in my study habits. I shall focus predominantly on Irish, with approximately three lessons per week scheduled with various teachers—hilarious— in the hopes of levelling up within 3-6 or even 8 months—this timeline is still up to debate depending on various factors such as finances, travel, quarantine status and miscellaneous slash other. My secondary main languages are Greek, German and Middle English—[Laughs] Sorry, reading it now is hilarious to me because I already know what happens, and now I know where I am in my studies and we're ... we're basically back at this point, but in a better way. Okay, let's not jump ahead of ourselves—So, my secondary main languages are Greek, German and Middle English. In these languages I aim to create one to two significant works of translation—wow—and/or auditory material. My main goal is to drastically avoid using the Internet—best of luck with that—and other electronic digital tools to aid me, with the exception of the online Greek-English Dictionary (until I have purchased my own dictionary in Greek)—I should add a footnote here: I have got my grandfather’s print dictionary and Greek and it is from the 1920s and I need a ... updated one. Anyways—and the Middle English corpus as necessary. Moreover, I should hope to complete some written exercises and short writings in Hebrew, Italian and possibly even French.

Correct me if I'm wrong: too much is going on in this section, and as we'll see, it just gets worse. 

Stay tuned next time to find out the mistakes I made, but also the benefits I experienced in trying to learn multiple languages at the same time and, especially, improving those levels at multiple times (???) without having the firm foundation necessary to actually complete that type of an activity. Ohh so many things to go over. I'm very excited. See you next time!

-polysprachig

[twinhood-2dot0]

A Shallow Dive into Sampling, Remixing, and Covering

Before we begin, I will define these words. My definitions are mine alone and there may be official ones, but I’m going to be sticking to mine.

Sampling: Taking a part of another song and using it in key elements of your songs.

Remixing: Taking a song and remaking elements such as melodies and basslines.

Covering: Recording of a song with minimal lyrical or musical changes.

So, I’m a huge fan of sampling, but many consider them copying. Hank made a video on it, which you probably have already watched but I will link it nonetheless.

I think of sampling as writing a love letter to a song. Take Avicii for example. I consider him a master of sampling. Yes, I know, I consider him a master of music, but my favourite things in his songs are his samples. 

So, his first big hit and also the anthem of Tomorrowland, the biggest music festival, as voted by fans, Levels, is a song he made, just to sample Etta James’s Something’s Got a Hold On Me because he loved it so much. I don’t think you can get any closer to a love letter. (BTW you don’t have to listen to the whole songs, just the parts I link)

(Tumblr doesn't wanna abide by timespants so just use the link or listen to the whole song (highly recommended))

(Dumb rule apparently only 10 videos are allowed per post so I will use spotify where relevant)

Here’s Levels

And here’s SGHOM (this one works the sample is at the beginning)

My favourite song of all time, Dear Boy, samples Hymn by Jonas Knutsson Band, a jazz song. He made a prog house bop out of a jazz song.

Dear Boy (Timestamp)

Hymn (Beginning)

There’s a ton more examples, but listing them all would take a ton of time, but here’s one last one.

Kygo, Avicii, Sandro Cavazza - Forever Yours (Beginning)

Sting - Shape of My Heart

I don’t think this shows lack of creativity, I think it does the opposite. I never would have heard these songs if Avicii did not sample them so I got him to thank for that. Moving on, we have Daft Punk, one of Avicii’s biggest inspirations, no idea if he was inspired to sample by them too. (I’m sorry I circled back to Avicii but that’s just how it is with me, I’m sorry.) 

Daft Punk samples lots. And I mean lots. I don’t think lack of creativity even applies here because the samples are creative in and of themselves. Here’s a 2 min video (I’m sorry but you need to see this):

Here’s a song I love that has been sampled a lot.

David Martin - Can’t Smile Without You:

It’s been covered by Barry Manilow and The Carpenters, but I want to focus on the samplers here.

Daft Punk - Instant Crush:

And also by Marshmello in Leave Before You Love Me:

Now, onto remixing. I don’t think I have much to say here, I think everyone knows what remixing is, but anyways, I’ll provide an example (Trying my best to not link an Avicii song but he does make the best remixes even if they’re very few). While in the process of writing this I was watching a video of Daft Punk samples and they even sampled the Apollo 16 and 17 missions apparently. 

Okay let’s get back on track. Kygo in the space between his 2020 and 2022 albums released a lot of covers/remixes of 80s songs. Kygo, Whitney Houston - Higher Love:

Whitney Houston - Higher Love: https://youtu.be/DbmiyLe2OnY

I cannot for the life of me find Whitney Houston's cover on Spotify, so enjoy the original Steve Winwood one:

I call this a cover/remix because according to my definition it should be a remix but the naming of the track seems reminiscent of covers. If it had a different singer I’d classify it as a cover but no, it’s Whitney Houston with Kygo instrumentals so it’s a remix in my eyes. (Also footnote, Higher Love was originally performed by Steve Winwood, covered by Whitney Houston and remixed by Kygo.) Kygo also got big by posting his remixes of songs on Soundcloud, so here’s one of them, it’s an Ed Sheeran one:

Kygo's remix is an unofficial one he posted on Soundcloud so no Spotify :(

Ed Sheeran - I See Fire (Kygo Remix): https://youtu.be/F3o1izxjCkM

Ed Sheeran - I See Fire: https://youtu.be/2fngvQS_PmQ

Imho this is the third best remix ever made behind Avicii's best.

Anyways, moving on to covers. Jasmine Thompson is a famous cover artist, and made a cover of Ain’t Nobody. I guess Felix Jaehn liked it and made a backing track for it. Here there’s new instrumentals and new vocalist, but nothing else has changed.

Felix Jaehn ft. Jasmine Thompson - Ain’t Nobody: https://youtu.be/5j1RCys4R0g

Chaka Khan - Ain’t Nobody: https://youtu.be/-Ro8-ngA8gs

The next song is an ABBA one! This is a unique case in that I love both versions equally. Again, new instrumentals, new singer (I think?), same melody, same lyrics

ABBA - Gimme Gimme Gimme: https://youtu.be/XEjLoHdbVeE

GAMPER & DADONI - Gimme Gimme Gimme: https://youtu.be/OR5jsmDTUrc

I’ll sign off with a hilarious song I discovered. It’s a song about a girl who’s in utter denial about her breakup. I know I shouldn’t be laughing but holy hell the level of denial:

NOTD, Nina Nesbitt - Cry Dancing: https://youtu.be/Qp-UbtDVf7I

Okay, that’s it from me, I tend to ramble on, sorry, see you on thursday!

-Alia

(Oh wow I overshot by about 5 times damn, the shallow dive turned out to be pretty deep also this took a lot of effort please appreciate not the post it's pretty much a rant but the embeds took effort and also the last minute edits scrambling to somehow get this done by 12 even though I had most of the content ready days ago this is literally the only thing I can get done on time ok thank you bye i'll stop talking now see you)

[candyclouds-and-summerblooms]

decided to make a tumblr for my Ao3!

About me:

You may call me Peony (or like any kind of flower, I’ll be eagerly waiting what you come up with!) My preferred pronouns are it/ its, but if you feel uncomfortable using them, she/her is okay. Do not they/them me, or I will identify as a fucking problem and come after you with a hoe and turn yours into was/were.

I’ve been digging my roots into the soil for over 25 years. I am old, I get grumpy, I have specific dietary needs and very little patience for drama! That being said, if you’re nice and respectful, I will be the same towards you.

I write only sporadically because I’m a busy bee and this is my hobby. Currently I’m neck-deep in the Call of Duty franchise, with a special appreciation for the MW2 storylines. Captain MacTavish can call me anytime, and I do mean any time. I’ll be here, waiting.

The ask-box is open! Please don’t abuse it.

Tag System:

#from the flowerpot: personal tweets

#archive of nonsense: posts I find humorous

Footnote:

This blog is pro-fiction/ anti-censorship! Always remember Stephen’s Tweet — literature is a tool, and controlling the tools means controlling the user.

People have a myriad of different reasons and perspectives because all of our lives are to a degree unique. This makes for a colourful medley of experiences that get worked into stories and reflected by fiction. There is no metric good or bad in fiction except from —perhaps— the overall execution, but this is still a hobby for most of us at the end of the day! No piece of fanfiction or fanart should be up to industry standards! If you feel that way, then I’m sorry but you are part of the problem.

Industry standards have always been exclusionary and deeply racist and ableist. Fanworks are not part of an industry, they are a token of love and appreciation from any young flower to the thoughts and ideas of entire creative teams. Fanartists are a huge subculture, the venn diagram of fanartists, queer and BIPOC people is damn near a perfect circle and that’s for a reason! We simply do not fit the industry standard and that’s what makes this community so incredibly diverse and rich. This is what makes us beautiful.

But every flower in this community has their own needs — monsteras, carnivorous plants, cypress trees, daffodils and orchids all have their spot in my house and garden, and they all have their own soil, their own food, their own sun. You can’t put a cypress in peat and feed it orchid food and expect it to grow healthy. It’s not for them! And that’s fine, the peat soil is for the carnies and the orchid food for air plants and, as the name suggests, orchids.

What I’m trying to say is: if something clearly isn’t meant for you, you have to disengage. It’s the only respectful thing to do, both to OP and yourself. In the age of click-fed algorithms, rage-baiting is the easiest way to garner attention — and I am well aware that a lot of us neglected souls have it hardwired into our brains that any kind of attention is better than no attention. This is harmful.

Go out, be kind, disagree privately and disengage quietly, please.

[kunstmull]

Captain Save-A-Hisashi rides again!

I don't know if the comment got eaten by the spam filter; or if it was another case of "did not understand my sense of humour"; or if the blogger has fallen into a black hole on the way to Andromeda, but I did actually save the text, and wanted to post it somewhere, in case anyone ever has any response.

{Comment followed a thread where a random googler had asked for explanation of the Greek letters in Buck-Tick's Nostalgia - Vita Mechanicalis. CP responded to the effect of, don't read too much into it, Imai is not very well educated and the whole thing was just a reference to some Steampunk phone game.}

((Further edited to add: yes, it's entirely possible that this is just a reference to a game, and Delta-Iota-Lambda-Xi refers to nothing more complicated than:

There is indeed both a Delta and a Xi in these characters))

The comment I left in response:

It’s true that Imai is an art school dropout, and his monotropic brain simply cannot hang on to information he doesn’t have an interest in, such as penmanship or random prefectures of Japan. It’s such a SHAME that there is literally no place on Earth or Andromeda where one can come across Greek symbols other than high school maths class!

Chapter 1: amidst the profusion of Imai interviews I’ve absorbed recently, I came across one where our boy mentioned reading James Gleick, so it’s clear he actually does read popular science. (Sorry I can’t footnote it for you, my monotropic brain has never got the hang of footnotes.) Something clicked, as to why the ill-fated tour for Cosmos was named CHAOS: it’s a pun, a synthesis of the “Anarchy” meaning (another long-term preoccupation of Imai, hence the most obvious) and the “complex, self-organising systems” meaning – manifesting in the post-Gleick mid-90s as a pop-science fascination with Fractals. On the chance Imai was fibbing about reading a big book about maths, the ideas popularised by Gleick were widely discussed and heavily used in the fields of Videogame design and Animation – fields Imai has well-known and documented Special Interests in. Knowledge absorbed from pop culture is still knowledge.

Chapter 2: Imai got online in the mid-90s, as documented in his seminal “log off and touch grass” song. What was he arguing about on Usenet? Same things as the rest of us early internet geeks: “Dinosaurs, CT scanners, love, that girl's tooth prints, Klein bottles etc.” Your translation of “いわゆる全てに共通する図形“ is lost, but Google misTranslate is giving me "So-called common-to-all shapes" something that looks suspiciously like set theory or platonic solids? The ~Science Side of Tumblr~. Imai was soaking in it!

Conclusion: living on the net, reading popular science books, imbibing sci-fi, it is not inconceivable that Imai either *does* know the common maths/physics meanings of the Greek symbols he chose; or he lifted them directly from someone who does. (Edited to add: this is the thing; even if he did just lift it from a game; games designers are notorious for adding esoteric references as Easter Eggs. Coming from a game does not mean that it is not meaningful.)

So let’s look at these symbols and see how they link to other common geography of Hisashiland

Δ Delta – this is the easiest one. Delta is the rate of change, usually over time. Everything changes. The only constant over time is change. (The second law of thermodynamics, entropy fans.) ((Edited to add: if I look through my Tumblr archives, I probably can find a long post I made about the relationship between the Second Law of Thermodynamics and Einstuerzende Neubauten's Sehnsucht.))

Ι Iota – the smallest possible amount. How often has Imai referenced scientific words for the concept of the most tiny? Atom Futurist No. 9 (Democritus theorised the Atom – indivisible – as the smallest, infinite, indestructible building block of nature before the Victorians smashed this to pieces with the discovery of the Electron.) Quantum I & II – quantum theory smashed the idea of the smallest building block of nature the way Rutherford smashed the indivisible atom. Iota is another science term for the same thing: the tiny indivisible.

Λ Lambda – the Cosmological Constant. Since the Big Bang, the Universe has been constantly expanding (see section Delta – change!) Lambda is a little mathematical fiddle that Einstein added to the Theory of Relativity to account for the fact that the expansion of the universe is always accelerating. Why? Dark Matter? Dark Energy? This is hotly debated in physics, but in Hisashiland the metaphor of Dark Matter or Dark Energy is repeatedly employed as a necessary corrective for the Blue Sky of conformity.

Ξ Xi – this one was the hardest to crack. At first I thought he’d mis-transliterated the Greek Chi which is the standard mathematical X of the unknown. Xi is the Riemann Function. What’s he about? He’s usually associated with non-Euclidean geometries, surfaces that are impossible outside of multidimensional spaces – moebius strips, Calabi-Yau manifolds (the working model for superstrings, another way of trying to understand where all the extra dark energy/matter is hiding in 10-dimensional space, see Lambda for what Dark Energy means in Hisashiland), and… Klein Bottles, which Imai was getting in flame wars over on the early internet. To understand the true scientific nature of reality, one has to think outside the mosquito net – outside the constraints of the human limitations of three-dimensional perception. In Riemannian maths, dark energy can fold up to hide inside extra dimensions within infinitesimally tiny spaces.

Now these letters may have been chosen stochastically, but all four of them refer to concepts that recur again and again in the hermeneutics of Hisashiland. And one of Gleick’s most profound insights is that randomness isn’t actually that random. Even chaos follows its own cosmological order. Imai may be dirty and strange, but he’s nowhere near as cute-and-dumb as he looks!

[lino-know]

heyyy seong

idek if you use tumblr anymore. personally i only used it in like 2020-2021 during my early kpop phases but maybe people still do

anyways i’ll start off by saying that i hope you’re doing good! (can’t believe it’s already 2023) i also hope you’re feeling better mentally, physically, spiritually, and in any other way possible. these past few years have really been tough. idk what it is but after covid everything’s just sped up. life is just going by so fast and let’s be honest, it’s incredibly overwhelming. that’s why i think it’s so important to take time for ourselves and really understand what’s going on in our minds.

i have no idea why i wrote this as if you know who i am and as if we’ve been friends for years. i just happen to come back onto tumblr today and remembered about your story misfits (which i absolutely adore btw it’s the literal embodiment of gold) and wanted to vomit my thoughts out to a stranger

in any case maybe you’ll see this maybe you won’t but thanks for having this page as an outlet for strangers to vent <3

— a random person who had a lot of her mind (and is also kinda wondering about an update regarding misfits now that she thinks about it)

heyyy!! I'm really sorry I haven't replied to this - I feel like I should've earlier lmao but I've been kind of gatekeeping this ask in my inbox because it made me feel warm and fuzzy all over :)

I hope you're doing well in all the ways possible too - covid really has turned the world upside down twice over and it hasn't been easy for any of us, I'm sure. a lot has happened in the time that passed and honestly I don't think I would've turned out the way that I am if it hasn't happened - but I don't regret it, tbh.

don't stress about suddenly popping into my inbox without warning - I've said multiple times that it's open for anything you want to send in and honestly your ask has made my day multiple times over when I log back onto tumblr to read it, whenever my mental health is hitting rock bottom again :)) I'm glad you decided to take time out of your day to send it in hehe. feel free to chat me up over dms, honestly, because I feel like having an extra friend makes our lives better - but I do want to say I'm using tumblr less and less nowadays

an update about my life? maybe? idk if anyone's interested but essentially I started this blog when I was 18 and now I'm nearly done with university. it's kind of insane thinking about how fast the years have gone by - it almost feels like yesterday when I started this blog in quarantine out of boredom, and now it's two years down the line haha

as for misfits, first of all, thank you for thinking about it and I'm really happy that you still remember the story :) I wrote it when I was chilling around and posted it after a tumblr mutual I made after I created this blog told me to - she's no longer on tumblr or skzblr(?) for personal reasons but I look back on that fondly

about updates, I do intend to continue the story just because so many people enjoyed it, even though I'd admit I don't think it's my best work. I still have my old notebook full of notes and ideas for future skz-centric works, but I guess the reason why I stopped was because I don't really pay attention to skz that much anymore. I admire them as a fledgling artist myself, but I haven't been keeping tabs on them now that I'm starting to explore my own artistic ventures (!!). that said, I still have the plot of misfits in my head, but I guess that having started and continued the story with numerous historical footnotes, I feel like I have to continue doing that and keeping everything as historically accurate as possible haha

but yeah, that's pretty much about it, if I'm posting works here, consider it as writing practice rather than excited squeals about skz. again, I really admire them as people, but it's also because of that that I feel kind of weird writing fanfiction about them. I'm not opposed to the idea of it or other people doing it, I personally just feel more comfortable writing filth about 2D characters (and I do have a sideblog for anime-centric works if you're interested!) I don't think I'll shut this blog down ever because I am proud of what I've created here - and I'm really happy that you view it safe enough to send in a ramble. my inbox is always open if you want to talk more :)) hope you're doing well!

[ciceroprofacto]

Well it's putting the cards on the table time apparently. I heard once about a rumor that basically said that you didn't do the research for soa, nor did your wife. That some Tumblr user(s) actually made ("an important") part of the research. I think the ones that told me that hate you or something.

So I just wanted to know - is that true? Because well, even i sometimes thought that it was almost impossible to make that amount of research by oneself. Or even two people. Both in so, so busy careers and being successful in those careers.

Look, it's not as if I believed it's completely impossible. I mean, I've been building a world with my bf for some years now, and just a month ago we discovered that its political laws are incredibly similar to spartan ones... without any of us having ever studied ancient politics before.

So anyways. Have a nice day!

ugh. I've seen this one (or a variation of it) before and I have some questions.

what's this 'important part' of the research that I didn't do?

and if not me...who's doing it?

seriously- who? I'd love to call them up. I was begging for help when I first started- what do y'all think that obnoxiously-long timeline post (made January 9th 2017) was? it's literally titled as a call to action...and it barely got feedback at the time. it took 6 chapters for @madtomedgar to pick me up and help with editing until I got my footing and then @denialandavoidance picked me up. if anyone can be credited with helping me, it's them- which is why they are credited on those chapters. but, I will say, and they could attest (though this is so far below worth our time...), the legwork was always there on the details. I just needed touch-ups, fact checks, and proofreading.

on that- did we just...scroll past the years of posts where I was discovering details for the timeline and sharing them...some of that process was pretty public? unfortunately, a lot of it was also just in my notes and on the chapter drafts because I was more worried about writing the story than showing my work...because it's a fanfic. I couldn't imagine anyone would need me to prove that I'd researched.

which- what is the bar here for citations? the closest thing I've done to a bibliography has been the recent meta posts I'm making on the reread, but the idea of including that on the work itself is nightmarish. even my meta post leaves a lot out, and you'd end up with ~2k words of notes on each chapter. that ruins the immersion, distracts from the plot, and worst- adds extra effort on my part. I just won't do it. sorry. I'm not making money off this, I'm not being graded on it. it's a fanfic.

even if I tried, a full-bibliography isn't going to have all the records for every nitty-gritty detail that's included in the story. I wasn't adding footnotes on my drafts as I went along. I just wasn't. my method was to keep it as simple as possible, and a bibliography wasn't the priority, just getting the information. I basically just had a timeline that was like an agenda for each day and I was backfilling it with details from all the books and journals and primary source documents I was reading. anytime a date would come up in a source, I'd add it to my notes. anytime there was a gap or I had specific questions, I'd dig around until I could fill it (or I’d make something up because it’s fiction). though most of my sources were publicly-accessible (we stan Wiki in this house), I don't even have access to everything I used back in 2015-18. I was in college and had access to academic databases, my library, and @john-laurens was also still in school with similar accesses, and towards the end of 2016, started helping me find specific details. google could get me 90% of the way there, but the really detailed day-to-day stuff was in letters and journal entries.

it seems a lot like how someone might research to write a biography, they'd just be more thorough about annotating their sources since their goal is to publish...I might not be doing it for the same reasons, but why is it so hard to believe I could?

anyway- no. that's not true. I've had contributors. the people I've mentioned above have helped me directly and they're credited in the work because of it- though I would still emphasize for the context of this question, their help has mostly been as editors, occasionally fielding specific questions or giving me source recommendations. any contributions other than theirs would come from posts that are public on this blog, but I truly, genuinely, can't think of any that have already been incorporated or would warrant recognition...

if someone feels like I've missed something they gave me, they're always welcome to take it up with me.

[redinkofshame]

 1. How many works do you have on AO3?

17! My favorite number.

2. What’s your total AO3 word count?

178,176. Dang!

3. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

@theDuckPond Solavellan slow burn? smlungst, 62,553 words

New Life papae!Solas with lots of smut, 6606 words

Marigolds in the Hanged Man Varrigold! :D Varric/Marigold, 43,527 words

(3.5 is Dreaming With You (Solas x Reader), but I’m only a partial writer on that one so I’m not counting it.)

Labor and Loss papae!Solas with lots of sad, 4097 words

Kirkwall Karaoke f!Fenhawke drunken shenanigans, 7023 words

Wow I wasn’t expecting my karaoke fic to be on this list! And you guys really like your papae!Solas :D

4. Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

I do, yes, because when I leave comments it gives me anxiety that only seeing them reply fixes and I want to do that for other people. Unfortunately back when I updated every week (lol) I got in the habit of replying to comments when I posted something new... So now when I go a long time without posting a new chapter I leave the comments on read for a long time. Sorry guys!!

5. What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

Honestly? This Nonsense. (Link is to a long series of messages to @keturagh at 3am, no joke.) 

But, since then, I’ve figured out an alternative ending that’s much happier. I can’t help it. I want happy endings.

6. What’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending?

As per #5, all of them lol. The first one that came to mind was Marigolds, but honestly my soulmate au Vhenaslin feels the fluffiest to me. 

And, of course, there’s this one ;) 

7. Do you write crossovers? If so what is the craziest one you’ve written?

I haven’t, not yet :( Like, I like the concept but no combination I’ve thought of has given me even the slightest bit of inspiration.

8. Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Yep! I received one that was something like “Congrats! You’ve written the most insufferable OC I’ve ever read!!” and it was fucking hilarious because it was on, like, chapter 6? You read 6 chapters about a character you didn’t like and somehow it’s my fault?? lmao

There was another one I can’t remember, too, and twice people have called Elle a bitch. All of these happened to Elle from Duck Pond, so if that’s not a glowing recommendation~

9. Do you write smut? If so what kind?

ROFL yeah that’s why I’m here. Like literally why I joined the fandom. 

Everyone I’ve written is m/f and not particularly kinky but pretty damn explicit. Sometimes I do fade-to-black or gloss over for pacing, but mostly... Yeah. There’s smut. let Solas nut

10. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I know of. Sure af hope not.

11. Have you ever had a fic translated?

Nope. At least, not that I know of!

12. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Yes! There was a Solas x Reader post on tumblr that people were reblogging and adding a little more too, and I guess that the foreplay went on too long because @keturagh sent it to me like ‘you’re the expert of getting the P in the V!’ and I’ve never written Reader fic before (or since) but who am I to disappoint!! 

Then someone compiled it all and put it on AO3 here. I don’t have a damn clue where my writing begins -- other than I got the P in the V lol. Every once in a while I get a notification of a comment or kudos on it and  every SINGLE time I’m like

13. What’s your all-time favorite ship?

Very clearly Solavellan. Though I’m also very into Opal/Nik from the Minimum Wage Magic books by Rachel Aaron. I listened to the audiobook because Patrick Weekes shared their reading list on twitter once and it was on there and I’m a HUGE sucker for juxtaposition. Gets me every time. 

I’ve since read uuuhhhh almost everything Rachel Aaron/Bachs has read, and there’s lots of great stuff in there, but MWM is still my favorite series of hers by far. My own personal Couch AU. 

14. What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

Uuhhhh.... So many? Or more like I’m scared I never will, in any case. I started drafting a list of my WIPs and it got... long. I can’t think of any I made a deliberate choice to never finish. There’s only 1 fic that I wrote that I didn’t post.

15. What are your writing strengths?

Dialogue, pacing, and sex~ 

I consider my dialogue my biggest asset as a writer tbh

16. What are your writing weaknesses?

WRITING THE WORDS DOWN and also how do plot?

17. What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

In the fandom there’s a tendency to write lines in elvhen and then put the translation at the end and yeah no it drives me bonkers. It completely destroys the immersion and pacing for no pay off. I’m not going to scroll down to understand your story. I just read it straight and try to figure out what’s going on based on context. 

I stick with the well-known canon lines that most of us obsessed fans know by heart. I think sometimes I put a translation in there for newcomers, maybe? One time I used a feature on AO3 where you can hover your mouse over the work and it has like a footnote? that you can use to translate. But I immediately stopped bc #1 I don’t know how that works on mobile and #2 it really doesn’t seem like that’s going to work with screen readers. But otherwise I just say ‘they said in elven’ or have the narrator translate it themself for the reader. 

Also, a lot of people use the elvhen translations from that BNF’s project and like... If you WANT him to say ‘I want to paint you with my cum’ then just have the courage to say it straight! 

18. What was the first fandom you wrote for?

lmao Harvest Moon. Yeah. After that was Tamora Pierce (modern girl in Tortall yep). Then was like a 15 year gap until I got frustrated at the slow pace of the romance with this egg in this game so I wanted to see if there was smut... (Cue Googling: Is FanFiction.Net still a thing?)

19. What’s your favorite fic you’ve written?

Oh gosh. Hmm. I love all my girls, but Duck Pond was/is a major work of love. Unlike my short works I really had the chance to explore more in a full length fic, you know?

(Marigolds is also full length but it was my first fic and there’s some spots that I’m not too proud of.)

That’s all the questions but I’m adding:

20. What’s a fic you’re proud of that hasn’t gotten much attention?

because I want an excuse to mention how hard I worked on Kirkwall Noir and how I’m surprised how little readership it’s gotten. It’s Varric! It’s Marigold! It’s super short, unlike most my stuff. Maybe that’s why people don’t like it?

Hmm, I also used a AO3 pen name, but it would still show on my page, right? 

Thank you for the tags, @roguelioness and @thevikingwoman !!  Consider yourself re-tagged so you can answer #20. Also tagging: @blarfkey @broomclosetkink @elveny @bardinhightown @keturagh​ @luzial​ 

[gildedmuse]

Oh, you innocent poster. Tags are where I live.

Drake: Yo, I don't want to sound needy and desperate and all that, but Strawhat Luffy, when I look at you all I can think about is a good old fashion alliance.

Zoro:

Zoro:

Zoro: So you have choosen death.

[sineala]

Hey! I know you've received asks about long distance relationships before but I hope you don't mind if I ask, too :) The thing is a bit complicated and I need some advice, and your story is just so beautiful I'm like, "please adopt me!!" There's this person on tumblr whom I have a crush on, sort of: we've never actually interacted because I don't have a tumblr account but she posts a lot of things I love and info on herself too, so I feel like I know her. 1/2

2/2 I'm ace and never dated, which is a problem because I don't really know what to do, and I'm also very shy, but... the question is... what can I do? i can't just send her a message and say, "I have a crush on you, but you don't know anything of me. Can we try to date?" But on the other hand I really don't know how to start talking to her... :( sorry, I'm just an awkward human being... and thank you for listening to my problems! But of course feel free to ignore me. Take care ❤️

Okay. Wow. This is a lot, anon. I had to think for a while about how to say this as nicely as I possibly can, but: I don't think you should do what you're asking me how to do. At all. I don't think your feelings are bad or wrong or invalid, and I get why you feel the way you do, but there's really not a good, kind, or fair way to get the outcome that you want. You can try to make friends with her if you legitimately want to be friends with her, but you can't be friends with her for the purpose of dating her.

I have more to say under the Read More.

You might find it helpful to read something about the concept of parasocial relationships. The tl;dr version is that parasocial relationships are relationships that an audience experiences with people like celebrities or performers. You, the audience member, don't actually interact personally with the person you have this parasocial relationship with -- everything you know about them is because you actually know the persona they are adopting for public consumption, rather than the person themselves -- but you feel like you know them anyway.

I'm not saying that parasocial relationships are bad. They can be good! They can be positive! I'm pretty sure we all have them. Heck, media fandom is basically us having massive numbers of parasocial relationships with fictional characters! Parasocial relationships can be great and inspiring! Having a favorite character or a favorite celebrity can make you really happy! Do I have parasocial relationships too? Yeah, sure, you bet. The Goodreads review I have that has garnered the most likes is the one that is approximately 50% me explaining that I have a giant crush on Rachel Maddow. I have never met Rachel Maddow. I obviously do not know the real Rachel Maddow, and I would not want to actually for-real date her even if both of us were single. I can just be happy reading her books and watching her TV show. There's a video game I like to play, Slay The Spire, and I have a favorite Slay The Spire streamer on Twitch, and at this point I have probably watched hundreds of hours of this dude playing video games, and because of that, I know a lot of random facts about this guy's life. Does he seem like he'd be cool to hang out with? Yeah, sure. Have I ever interacted with him in any way other than subscribing to his YouTube channel? Nope! I don't even have a Twitch account! Do I know him as a person? Absolutely not.

I'm saying all this because social media is a place you can have parasocial relationships, and the relationship you have with this Tumblr user is parasocial. (Incidentally, the relationship you have with me is also parasocial; I mention this because I feel like you should know that asking me to adopt you is coming on a little too strong, as an opening interaction. I don't mean to make you feel bad about this, and I'm sorry if I have, but since you're asking about how to interact with people you've never spoken to before, you should probably know that.)

It basically comes down to this: you don't actually know this person, but you feel like you do because you've read her Tumblr. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. That's not a criticism. That's not a value judgment. I mean, technically, you don't know me either. That's just not the kind of relationship that I have with you, or that you have with her. It's parasocial, not reciprocal. And you really need to keep that in mind.

Can you form reciprocal relationships with people you have parasocial relationships with? I mean, yeah, maybe, depending on the person. And the answer to how you do that is basically the answer to the question "how do you make friends with people?" -- and it seems like you might like advice about that, since you said you were shy, You talk to someone about mutual interests that you both enjoy. You hang out. Maybe in RL in Better Times you meet up and go get lunch together. These days on the internet I make most of my internet friends by (1) squeeing back and forth at them about whatever fic they wrote and clogging up their AO3 comments until we take it to email, (2) yelling about fandom on Discord until we mutually discover we are like-minded enough to start yelling at each other in DMs directly, and (3) murdering them in games of Among Us and then lying about it. (Games are a bonding experience.)

You listen well, you share some things about yourself because that's what friends do and if the other person wants to be your friend they will share things back -- or maybe they will share things first, if they decide they want to be friends first. This is how we humans like to bond with each other. I feel like I am not very good at this friend-making thing, so I am not sure I am the best person to ask for tips. But that is basically how it works.

Can you be friends with this person? Maybe. I don't know. You can try. But what I do know is that you absolutely should not try to be friends with her with the intention of dating her. People don't like when they think someone is friends with them because they want something from them, and, generally, people really really don't like when someone is friends with them when the thing they want from them is a romantic relationship. You know how you hear people (usually straight guys) talk about being "friendzoned?" They're upset because they're friends with a woman they want to date and the woman sees them as only a friend. That is the realm your proposed interaction is adjacent to, and that is not a good place to be. Don't be like one of those guys.

I think you should ask yourself if you would be happy being friends with this person if there were zero possibility of romance with her. If you would be happy being just friends. And be honest with yourself. If, after some soul-searching, you decide that, yeah, you would feel 100% satisfied just being her friend if nothing else ever happened (and you have to honestly believe this), then and only then should you try talking to her.

What should you talk about? I don't know; you must have something in common. I have made friends with people because we both enjoyed Avengers volume 3 and classic Star Trek. I made friends with a bunch of people in college because we all liked to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Smallville. I have made friends with people because I told them I liked the book they were reading or the pins on their backpack. I have made friends with people because we both were in the same science-fiction online roleplaying group as teenagers and it turned out twenty years later we were sharing a fandom, we now lived in the same state, and we also liked the same folk music! I made friends with my wife because I wanted to complain to her about a Due South fanfic I was reading and she didn't like it either and then I was translating a text for class that was in Ancient Egyptian and the footnotes were in German and I didn't know German (and still don't) but I knew she did. At that point I had absolutely no clue there would be any romance involved there; I just thought she was really cool and she seemed to think I was cool and then we just kept talking.

So, y'know, maybe, if you just want to be her friend, you can try to do that. You can find out if you actually like her as an actual, real person. But you have to want to just be friends.

But if you think you'd be unhappy if you were just friends with her, you absolutely should not try to be friends with her, because that would be misrepresenting what you want and it would also be very unfair to her.

(Edited to add: I guess the other option is that you could, in fact, just be like, “Hey, I have a crush on you,” which would be both honest and forthright -- but I feel like that has a very, very low chance of working. Hence all the other advice.)

I hope that helps.

[kanna-ophelia]

Hey! I love your blog! I got into good omens recently and have been obsessed. Anyways, I came because I saw one of your old posts about fanfiction and how fictional characters do not exist and can't give consent/be abused. I was just thinking, do these same rules apply to RPF as well? I don't think they do because they're dealing with real people right? And if they don't follow the same rules, what do they follow? Just wanted to hear your thoughts!

Sorry for the late reply! I'm very rarely on Tumblr these days.

Good Omens is joy, so glad you found it. RPF: This is all kind of complicated. Disclaimer: I used to be pretty anti-RPF, but I don't hold that position anymore.

Basically I think there's a distinction between, say, someone making up stories about someone at school and work and passing them around, which affects people's immediate circle and can do real harm, and stories on a clearly fictional archive like AO3, Wattpad, Nifty or Literotica, where everyone knows it's fiction and it's not the "real" people who are doing and saying those things. No one actually thinks BTS are US high-schoolers or that fans are depicting realevents in their romances.

RPF has a longer and more established legal basis than fictional person fiction. Even my mother's "girls' papers" had fiction with pop stars in them, and years and years ago someone gave me book of women's dreams (some very explicit) about Madonna. I think it's pretty clear that people are treated as "characters" in RPF and are not the real people. I have far more problems with bioepics like Bohemian Rhapsody and Stardust which villainised people but were taken as at least generally true by audiences, or with the gossip/paparazzi media which claims their own made up stories are true. Both are which way more mainstream than Youtuber RPF, which is clearly fantasy.

I don't think the presence or absence of sex or gayness in a story should be a deciding factor, either.

Personally, I'm far more comfortable with fictional canons and characters, or at least long-dead historical ones. But as long as fic and art is kept clearly marked as fiction and on sites for fiction where it has to be deliberately accessed, and so long as RPF is never ever forced on creators (see also inappropriate questions at cons), I think RPF characters are actually just that, characters, and can't be harmed in a story.

(Footnote: I've ended up in people's stories, both in flattering ways and insulting ones. It felt weird, but the problem really was having my attention drawn to it. Either way, it was very much their impression of me, and not me as a person.)

[bccky]

Love how you write! Can I ask what your typical writing process looks like? You inspired me to write some ideas of my own

That's really sweet of you you made my day 🥺💝 I can't believe that I inspired someone oh my gosh

Sorry for taking so long to answer 😅 I wanted to do this as properly as I could

Okay so writing process you ask?

an idea pops into my mind, I write it as descriptive as I can in a discord server of my own so that I don't forget it

it's probably days, weeks or months (no one can tell) later when another idea that supplements the story pops up. It might be during a shower, when I'm studying, folding laundry or anything really

I add that idea into the first one and the process repeats until I have a storyline in short

Now on to the Google Docs (which I use, many people use Microsoft Word, Scrivener or even the basic notes app that's available on almost any phone)

I write and expand the whole idea as much as I can in one sitting

But wait, that's never the end product for me

I rewrite it probably 3 times until I'm satisfied with what I got, moving paragraphs up and down to get a good flow

Next comes the grammar check which I absolutely hate, I usually rely on the Google Doc's spell check and Grammarly (the latter when I've written things while half asleep lol)

Then, depending on how confident I am about the story or when I want to post the fic, I usually get someone (mostly friends) to look over it in case there are errors I didn't notice

Then, I copy paste the fic into the tumblr app, format the fic, add title, info, footnotes and tags, etc

And post!

That's it ☺ I hope this helps 😅

If you want, you can send the fic or the link to me once you've posted it! I'd love to read it Xx

If you're a writer, how does your writing process look like?

[tundrainafrica]

Hi and hello! I just recently found your blog and im really really happy that i did! I love your fics about levihan (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧ ✧ﾟ･: *ヽ(◕ヮ◕ヽ) anyways... i wanted to ask you if i could print my fave fic of urs? Its for personal use only! I promise!!!! I just prefer re- reading them while holding it as if it is a book.... and i want to put it in my bookcase together with the other fics about my other otp's... but it is ok if you won't allow it! I understand 😊😊😊😊 thank you!

Hi Anon! 

Omg, even though people have mentioned it before, I’m honestly still surprised people wanna reread my word vomit fanfiction and it gets me so warm on the inside getting stuff like this. 

Of course, feel free print my fics if that makes you happy! I mean as an avid fanfic reader I leave my fics posted because I’m hoping others can enjoy something too. So I guess it’s a gift to the fandom and as long as it’s for personal use, feel free to enjoy it how you want. 

I just have a few requests (which are not for me really, but for most other content creators as well) 

My first condition really is you just keep credit where credit is due when printing fanfiction or even just sharing the fic (particularly when quoting) like just keep that author’s name down there under the title or if you’re reposting or tweeting, make sure to link or make sure to keep the author visible. 

I personally don’t mind having my stuff quoted or shared without my name or link under but I just think that separating an author from their work just sets a dangerous precedence. 

For one, I believe all content creators should be appreciated for the hard work they do and appreciation isn’t so hard anyway since it’s just a small name under a title right?

Also as a reader and as a research geek, I just like knowing where my stuff comes from for further reading. I’m in love with sources. I read footnotes and bibliographies when I read papers and I like opening up blackholes of articles over one lead. So something to take note of.

And pls ask permission from the the content creator

The reason behind this is because writing fanfiction brings about some legal issues due to copyright especially when money is involved. I mean guys, we’re just lucky Yams isn’t Anne Rice 2.0

Because of that, Not all authors and content creators are open to this because they understandably want full management of their works and in case companies decide to tighten their grip on copyrights etc, a lot of authors are ready to take down everything. (But ao3 is working hard to make sure this doesn’t become reality so please appreciate the ao3 legal team)

So it will be very much appreciated if you ask before you repost or print (or not really if it’s for personal use but for credit’s sake just keep the author name visible) so at least authors are aware where their fics are and readers are aware who wrote it.

 I don’t really know if other authors and artists are uncomfortable with the links of their works being shared but one way I do go about resharing is I personally think it’s okay to just drop a link on a post or a tweet, no previews, let the readers go to the website where it is actually posted to see the actual work. 

Okay, for me, you don’t have to ask anymore. I dropped all my stuff on ao3 and tumblr knowing full well this is a public domain. My only condition is really if anyone reshares or prints my stuff, as long as there’s a link or there’s credit I honestly don’t mind.

I would probably still appreciate it if people asked though since I like knowing where the fruits of my blood, sweat and tears go but I probably wouldn’t mind too much if I just found some reader one day with a physical copy of my work. 

Just don’t earn money from it pls.

But it’s not the money issue, I don’t mind the money too much and I never intended to earn money at all word vomiting into ao3 and I never plan on monetizing my fandom activities really. I’m more scared of the legal implications involved with adding money to the mix.

Wow, this ended up a long post. Sorry for digressing. 

But yes, you may print my stuff. You may share my stuff. Just as long as credit is due and as long as the original posted in a link. If you plan on reposting my actual content, i would appreciate if people asked permission but low key I probably would laugh it off if I found some of my stuff posted online. 

Personally, I’m more terrified of the legal expenses and setting a dangerous precedence than the actual reposting of my work. 

Sorry if this went in all directions at once, I recently found a fic I wrote back in high school recently reposted to another website under a different author and this ask kinda had me thinking about that.

Like I didn’t think too much of the reposting, I just laughed it off and I ended up thinking ‘woah, I’m actually worth plagiarizing asdfghjk’ because it’s been years since I actually wrote for that fandom? But I know that a lot of other content creators would definitely not be okay seeing their work under a different creator or posters name without proper credit so I’ll put my foot down with the PLEASE CREDIT just because I want all other authors and artists appreciated and given the proper credit and respect as well.

On a side note...  

Just to share, I have something similar to what you have anon. I keep an ebook library on my ebook reader of my favorite fics. There’s this app called calibre which works similarly to itunes in making it loads easier to organize fic. And since ao3 makes it incredibly easy to download ebook files, I would just download them, organize them in calibre and push them to my kindle.

So, most of the fics I reread rn, are also on my kindle and for people who don’t have the means to print or line them on a huge shelf, putting the fics on calibre and just pushing them to an ebook reader like a kindle, almost simulates the whole book reading experience since the kindle has a paper white interface and the backlight can be turned off. (Not sure with other ebook readers since I’ve always been a kindle gal)

I actually have my own personal physical book compilation of all my favorite Levihan fanfictions (with all authors permissions granted) on my shelf right now and I will be keeping it for a very long time so that one day I can indoctrinate my children into the levihan cult.

I’m glad you enjoy my fic! (Out of curiosity though anon, which of my fics do you actually want printed?)