#that actually happened and it was NASTY

[liesmyth]

Your last rb on the John Gaius post how much John is the OPPOSITE of what that reblogger implied. Because like - we rag on him for not using his magical girl powers for C--'s "Good Wizardry", but it's specifically because he *doesn't* want to rely on a new untested "technology". He tries to incorporate it into the old project, make it better, make people trust it and give him money. Slow down the people who are trying to actually do the "promising new technology" bit without proof of concept.

It's "We all came up with trials to figure out what I could do, what I couldn’t do" vs

"...they were taking one discovery and acting like it changed the whole ballgame when really we now needed ten years of funding to discover whether it was any use, i.e., academia functioning as normal."

And I think that's neat, actually.

[post for context]

Ok actually #discourse aside, I think a lot about how John WAS a scientist, and that was the approach he used in his cryo project, and that was ALSO the approach he used when he started displaying magic powers. He tried to do experiments. He tried to make up scientific terms. He tried to write papers.

And nobody would listen and then he had to cosplay a wizard on youtube.

I think about that SO MUCH. Like... I think John never had a high opinion of the "cultists." He's obviously annoyed that one of the first guys who gave them attention was a flat earther. He only started calling himself a necromancer so that people would listen. It was a last resort and personally, I think he wasn't keen on it.

Like... I think John, an educated scientist who has successfully pioneered a potentially revolutionary new technology (the cryo project, not the magic!) AND is also an indigenous man of colour, might have felt some kinda way about putting on a cape and eyeliner and recruiting a gullible cult of followers because he wasn't being taken seriously in ~intellectual circles. I know we make jokes aboout God being a twitch streamer - Taz put that in for a reason! I think it's funny, I think the cult aesthetic is fun, I think the pre-Res gang HAD fun with it, eventually. But I also think that there's a lot to unpack about John going from the lead research on a project that had serious corporate and government backing ("We cannot keep diverting three percent of the country’s electricity to your vats") to putting on a cape for the memes.

Also! You're absolutely right that the FTL fleet IS "the special technology that shows no promise." John, Mercy AND Augustine all it as hooky because it's SO new that it can scale up to what they need, if it even works as advertised. I'm very curious if / how / on which scale it was tested, and I think Augustine was right to suspect that the FTL propulsion was just an initial kick and the fleet was gonna generation-ship it and never come back.

Also speaking of people wanting an "immediate fix" - John also explicitly brings up that some of the cryo project backers nagged at him because they though an imperfect technology was good enough but the team thought the chance of damage was too high, and worked to reduce it.

Like, the whole point of the cryo project is that it worked, but it wasn't an easy fix, it required literally global cooperation, and there was no priority access for first-class passengers.

I am once again pointing a huge neon sign in John's direction that says HE ATE THE SUN!! That's plenty enough! We don't have to directly contradict canon to sue him for ethics breaches.

[bunnieswithknives]

Gore, Violence and Blood under the cut

What a mess

[blooming-periwxnkle]

It's kinda crazy when you think about how Ming Yi is basically the less ghastly version of He Xuan. And he was there by Shi Qingxuan's side for centuries, and yet Shi Wudu never found out. He never recognized him.

Imagine being in He Xuan's shoes - like this guy pretty much ruined his life and is indirectly responsible for the deaths of everybody who was dear to him. Shi Wudu rarely descends. But on the eve of Hanlu, he went down to check if he really died or not. He Xuan remembered his face. It probably haunted him during his times at Mt Tonglu, but when he finally meets this person, there is nothing on his face, no shock or horror.

He forgot him, forgot the face of the boy whose life he ruined.

He never bothered to remember. As if he never had a life.

It kind of reminds me of this scene from a manga called Yona of the Dawn. The protagonist is a princess who's on the run. She had lived a sheltered life and was trying her best to adjust to her new life. One day, she had to hunt a fawn for food, and one of her friends asked her if she would be okay with watching it, and she replied that she isn't. It's still hard for her. But she said that in the palace, thousands of animals were slaughtered every day to feed the royal family, and she never paid attention to it. But now, if she averts her eyes, it would be like refusing to acknowledge that the poor creature had a life.

Shi Wudu ruined his life for the sake of his brother, but let alone remorse, he even forgot what he looked like. He was there by his brother's side for centuries, and yet it never struck him, not until the moment his survival was on the line. If he was guilty, would it have changed anything? Would it bring He Xuan's family and the life he lost back? No, but at least it would ensure that his life meant something, anything.

And even after he recognizes him, his first reaction still is not guilt, not remorse. But a question, "You're alive?", perhaps an indirect way of saying, 'did I make a mistake that day?' Or 'did I fail to clear such an important evidence of my crime?'

The person whose life and afterlife is a consequence of his crime, the first thing he says to him is that.

"Noble people really are forgetful'', and He Xuan really meant it. He experienced it himself. For centuries.

[greenerteacups]

oooh please someday tell us what you think of GOT

oh, no, it's my fatal weakness! it's [checks notes] literally just the bare modicum of temptation! okay you got me.

SO. in order to tell what's wrong with game of thrones you kind of have to have read the books, because the books are the reason the show goes off the rails. i actually blame the showrunners relatively little in proportion to GRRM for how bad the show was (which I'm not gonna rehash here because if you're interested in GOT in any capacity you've already seen that horse flogged to death). people debate when GOT "got bad" in terms of writing, but regardless of when you think it dropped off, everyone agrees the quality declined sharply in season 8, and to a certain extent, season 7. these are the seasons that are more or less entirely spun from whole cloth, because season 7 marks the beginning of what will, if we ever see it, be the Winds of Winter storyline. it's the first part that isn't based on a book by George R.R. Martin. it's said that he gave the showrunners plot outlines, but we don't know how detailed they were, or how much the writers diverged from the blueprint — and honestly, considering the cumulative changes made to the story by that point, some stark divergence would have been required. (there's a reason for this. i'll get there in a sec.)

so far, i'm not saying anything all that original. a lot of people recognized how bad the show got as soon as they ran out of Book to adapt. (I think it's kind of weird that they agreed to make a show about an unfinished series in the first place — did GRRM figure that this was his one shot at a really good HBO adaptation, and forego misgivings about his ability to write two full books in however many years it took to adapt? did he think they would wait for him? did he not care that the series would eventually spoil his magnum opus, which he's spent the last three decades of his life writing? perplexing.) but the more interesting question is why the show got bad once it ran out of Book, because in my mind, that's not a given. a lot of great shows depart from the books they were based on. fanfiction does exactly that, all the time! if you have good writers who understand the characters they're working with, departure means a different story, not a worse one. now, the natural reply would be to say that the writers of GOT just aren't good, or at least aren't good at the things that make for great television, and that's why they needed the books as a structure, but I don't think that's true or fair, either. books and television are very different things. the pacing of a book is totally different from the pacing of a television show, and even an episodic book like ASOIAF is going to need a lot of work before it's remotely watchable as a series. bad writers cannot make great series of television, regardless of how good their source material is. sure, they didn't invent the characters of tyrion lannister and daenerys targaryen, but they sure as hell understood story structure well enough to write a damn compelling season of TV about them!

so but then: what gives? i actually do think it's a problem with the books! the show starts out as very faithful to the early books (namely, A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings) to the point that most plotlines are copied beat-for-beat. the story is constructed a little differently, and it's definitely condensed, but the meat is still there. and not surprisingly, the early books in ASOIAF are very tightly written. for how long they are, you wouldn't expect it, but on every page of those books, the plot is racing. you can practically watch george trying to beat the fucking clock. and he does! useful context here is that he originally thought GOT was going to be a trilogy, and so the scope of most threads in the first book or two would have been much smaller. it also helps that the first three books are in some respects self-contained stories. the first book is a mystery, the second and third are espionage and war dramas — and they're kept tight in order to serve those respective plots.

the trouble begins with A Feast for Crows, and arguably A Storm of Swords, because GRRM starts multiplying plotlines and treating the series as a story, rather than each individual book. he also massively underestimated the number of pages it would take him to get through certain plot beats — an assumption whose foundation is unclear, because from a reader's standpoint, there is a fucke tonne of shit in Feast and Dance that's spurious. I'm not talking about Brienne's Riverlands storyline (which I adore thematically but speaking honestly should have been its own novella, not a part of Feast proper). I'm talking about whole chapters where Tyrion is sitting on his ass in the river, just talking to people. (will I eat crow about this if these pay off in hugely satisfying ways in Winds or Dream? oh, totally. my brothers, i will gorge myself on sweet sweet corvid. i will wear a dunce cap in the square, and gleefully, if these turn out to not have been wastes of time. the fact that i am writing this means i am willing to stake a non-negligible amount of pride on the prediction that that will not happen). I'm talking about scenes where the characters stare at each other and talk idly about things that have already happened while the author describes things we already have seen in excruciating detail. i'm talking about threads that, while forgivable in a different novel, are unforgivable in this one, because you are neglecting your main characters and their story. and don't tell me you think that a day-by-day account tyrion's river cruise is necessary to telling his story, because in the count of monte cristo, the main guy disappears for nine years and comes hurtling back into the story as a vengeful aristocrat! and while time jumps like that don't work for everything, they certainly do work if what you're talking about isn't a major story thread!

now put aside whether or not all these meandering, unconcluded threads are enjoyable to read (as, in fairness, they often are!). think about them as if you're a tv showrunner. these bad boys are your worst nightmare. because while you know the author put them in for a reason, you haven't read the conclusion to the arc, so you don't know what that reason is. and even if the author tells you in broad strokes how things are going to end for any particular character (and this is a big "if," because GRRM's whole style is that he lets plots "develop as he goes," so I'm not actually convinced that he does have endings written out for most major characters), that still doesn't help you get them from point A (meandering storyline) to point B (actual conclusion). oh, and by the way, you have under a year to write this full season of television, while GRRM has been thinking about how to end the books for at least 10. all of this means you have to basically call an audible on whether or not certain arcs are going to pay off, and, if they are, whether they make for good television, and hence are worth writing. and you have to do that for every. single. unfinished. story. in the books.

here's an example: in the books, Quentin Martell goes on a quest to marry Daenerys and gain a dragon. many chapters are spent detailing this quest. spoiler alert: he fails, and he gets charbroiled by dragons. GRRM includes this plot to set up the actions of House Martell in Winds, but the problem is that we don't know what House Martell does in Winds, because (see above) the book DNE. So, although we can reliably bet that the showrunners understand (1) Daenerys is coming to Westeros with her 3 fantasy nukes, and (2) at some point they're gonna have to deal with the invasion of frozombies from Canada, that DOESN'T mean they necessarily know exactly what's going to happen to Dorne, or House Martell. i mean, fuck! we don't even know if Martin knows what's going to happen to Dorne or House Martell, because he's said he's the kind of writer who doesn't set shit out beforehand! so for every "Cersei defaults on millions of dragons in loans from the notorious Bank of Nobody Fucks With Us, assumes this will have no repercussions for her reign or Westerosi politics in general" plotline — which might as well have a big glaring THIS WILL BE IMPORTANT stamp on top of the chapter heading — you have Arianne Martell trying to do a coup/parent trap switcheroo with Myrcella, or Euron the Goffick Antichrist, or Faegon Targaryen and JonCon preparing a Blackfyre restoration, or anything else that might pan out — but might not! And while that uncertainty about what's important to the "overall story" might be a realistic way of depicting human beings in a world ruled by chance and not Destiny, it makes for much better reading than viewing, because Game of Thrones as a fantasy television series was based on the first three books, which are much more traditional "there is a plot and main characters and you can generally tell who they are" kind of book. I see Feast and Dance as a kind of soft reboot for the series in this respect, because they recenter the story around a much larger cast and cast a much broader net in terms of which characters "deserve" narrative attention.

but if you're making a season of television, you can't do that, because you've already set up the basic premise and pacing of your story, and you can't suddenly pivot into a long-form tone poem about the horrors of war. so you have to cut something. but what are you gonna cut? bear in mind that you can't just Forget About Dorne, or the Iron Islands, or the Vale, or the North, or pretty much any region of the story, because it's all interconnected, but to fit in everything from the books would require pacing of the sort that no reasonable audience would ever tolerate. and bear in mind that the later books sprout a lot more of these baby-plots that could go somewhere, but also might end up being secondary or tertiary to the "main story," which, at the end of the day, is about dragons and ice zombies and the rot at the heart of the feudal power system glorified in classical fantasy. that's the story that you as the showrunner absolutely must give them an end to, and that's the story that should be your priority 1.

so you do a hack and slash job, and you mortar over whatever you cut out with storylines that you cook up yourself, but you can't go too far afield, because you still need all the characters more or less in place for the final showdown. so you pinch here and push credulity there, and you do your best to put the characters in more or less the same place they would have been if you kept the original, but on a shorter timeframe. and is it as good as the first seasons? of course not! because the material that you have is not suited to TV like the first seasons are. and not only that, but you are now working with source material that is actively fighting your attempt to constrain a linear and well-paced narrative on it. the text that you're working with changed structure when you weren't looking, and now you have to find some way to shanghai this new sprawling behemoth of a Thing into a television show. oh, and by the way, don't think that the (living) author of the source material will be any help with this, because even though he's got years of experience working in television writing, he doesn't actually know how all of these threads will tie together, which is possibly the reason that the next book has taken over 8 years (now 13 and counting) to write. oh and also, your showrunners are sick of this (in fairness, very difficult) job and they want to go write for star wars instead, so they've refused the extra time the studio offered them for pre-production and pushed through a bunch of first-draft scripts, creating a crunch culture of the type that spawns entirely avoidable mistakes, like, say, some poor set designer leaving a starbucks cup in frame.

anyway, that's what I think went wrong with game of thrones.

[psychesetra]

borrowed a book from the library and it's like a learning french thing

when i got to the numbers i thought of like a fic idea????

bottom al thats either radioapple or x reader where reader and/or luci make him count how many orgasms he's had and at some point he's so unable to think he reverts to french 🥰

[morhath]

I need them to kiss passionately. sorry.

[marisatomay]

there’s a tiktok going around of a woman recording herself sobbing directly into the camera because as she says in the text over the video of her crying her relationship of eight years just ended and since she has adhd that heightens your emotions and while this is not the first video of this kind i’ve seen making the rounds on al gore’s internet it is the first where i’ve seen people call anyone who criticizes the video a misogynist and truly genuinely people need to get a grip because from where i’m sitting we should be criticizing this behavior even more it’s so bizarre to me that we don’t more frequently say how weird and disturbing it is that we’ve created a culture where it’s perfectly normal to intentionally record yourself performatively experiencing all of the trials and triumphs of being alive for internet points which has been coupled with individuality culture and the need to pathologize every very human behavior and emotion to create people whose brains have been so broken that everyone now thinks their every experience is unique to them alone and so naturally they are the first person to feel awful after a long term relationship ends but because of a developmental disorder and not just because they’re a person with feelings and it fucking sucks when sad things happen and i hate it so much we need to knock it off stop recording yourself being alive. stop it.

[vimbry]

not to be a parasocial sap but creative partnerships that have lasted longer than some romantic marriages make me ill

[fidgetspringer-art]

✧ The Ardal stars ✧

[napping-sapphic]

Honestly so good that I’m too shy to talk to people because I’m like 80% sure my impulsive ass would just ask strangers if they wanted to try to fall in love just to see if we could

[bartholomewillustrated]

Now it is only Most morning's that Lazarus gets up very early and does some warm-up painting, there are Some mornings where he has... other... business... to attend to..... ;;;>w>

Tried to do something more pushed and extreme with the lighting this time to get more of that Harsh Sunrise look I wanted in the Morning Painting piece but fell kinda short on and it ended up looking a bit toned-down.. I think I did a better job here! the blue in those shadows really comes out and looks nice and cool.. and I got a nice warm pink undertone in there somehow.. Just gotta keep trying one supposes... either way enjoy! The full picture is on my Twitter (@/bartholomewsart)

[batsplat]

bat splat thank youuu for saying the pecco jorge rivalry is just for pecco as opposed to having the specter of Vale hanging over it. I want to ask tho, I have been seeing people say the only reason pecco wins the race is because he copies jorge's setup throughout friday/saturday/Sprint. Wanted your opinion on this because I have also heard that Pecco gives decent engineering input and builds his race slowly over the weekend. Was just confused about how much data sharing can actually help, and how much does it help with the ducati specifically!! Have a nice day, love your posts

have a good day too, anon!! and I will gladly spread the pecco narrative independence agenda!! it's something I really do like about the rivalry - expanded a bit in the comments under this, but it's neat to have something that really is Just Pecco's. from inception it's very much his own rivalry, his own narrative... idk, this sport is too reliant on valentino to provide any kind of narrative tension, and it's just sort of refreshing to see this multi-year narrative play out that has fuck all to do with that guy. enough

on the set-up copying, obviously that is bullshit. I mean, to be clear, I'm sure pecco absolutely copies the set-ups of other ducati riders, but that's very much a mutual process - it's something that benefits all the ducati riders, and they've all openly spoken about this. it's very helpful to be able to see the data from seven other riders!! that's a big part of why ducati has been so bloody good!! the main difference is that jorge tends to be faster from the start of the weekend, whereas pecco tends to take time to reach his level. which I suppose makes some people draw the conclusion that pecco is only fast once he's copied someone's set-up. again, this isn't the case - it is just a difference in approaches. points come... well, unfortunately, not just on sunday anymore, but they certainly do not come on a friday. pecco knows this, which is also why sometimes he's not even trying to top an fp1 session - this year there have been quite a few instances of jorge but not pecco throwing on a fresh set of tyres towards the end of fp1 and setting a particularly impressive lap time. there's also nothing wrong with THAT approach, jorge is playing to his strengths, but at a certain point we're just talking different run plans

(there is also a very obvious logical fallacy with this line of reasoning. if you are copying someone's set-up, then by definition you have the same set-up as them. and if you beat someone with the same set-up, then it stands to reason that you were riding better than them. sure, you can argue the success is less earned because your team... idk, just lazed around all weekend, but at the end of the day surely you still cannot be a bad rider if you are getting more out of another rider's set-up than they themselves are able to manage)

and yeah, pecco is known for giving good feedback! just being a good learner in general. here, actually, a little throwback from start of 2019 where pecco's crew chief gabarrini (who also ofc has worked with casey, lorenzo and briefly with marc) compared pecco and marc:

"A driver - all of them do this - starts at a certain level and ends the day at a higher level. What makes the difference is starting again where you were. Few have this quality: it often happens that a driver sets good times - without knowing why, without being aware of how he got there. The 'good' ones, on the other hand, have this characteristic: they achieve a result and know why they did it," explained the chief technician. Gabarrini even goes so far as to compare the MotoGP rookie with the current world champion: "I saw this quality in Márquez: I was with him when he made his debut in the MotoGP World Championship. His ability to not forget what he had learned impressed me. Once he had understood an aspect of the riding style, the set-up or any other thing to be faster, he had it in him forever. Pecco also has this quality." "In Valencia we started with a base similar to the one Lorenzo used: on paper it suited Bagnaia, based on what you could understand when you saw him riding a Moto2 bike. From then on, the normal changes to the set-up were made so that he could ride the bike as he liked. In the meantime, Pecco has worked enormously to adapt his style to the Ducati."

and there you have it - pecco's good at progressively getting better at stuff, including over the course of the weekend. as for the set-up copying thing, partly it's just typical competitive paranoia (even though it feels like the fans are currently doing it more than the riders). back in the day, valentino and jorge used to have the world's dumbest arguments about this every other week. led to one of my all time fave messy jb moments:

god I miss that guy so badly. they don't do ride-or-die like that anymore

the point is that both sides were engaging in pretty silly mudslinging, just kind of for the vibes of it. valentino/jb trying to get under jorge's skin and jorge a bit more earnestly aggrieved. as ever, if you want to read more about how that particular era of jorge/valentino unfolded, see here. this is just to say, this kind of faffing about is a tale as old as time and it's always a bit silly... you had jorge say that it was impossible for them anyway to copy each other's data in the very same answer as he accused valentino of copying his set-up. like, I'm sorry, I am not going to take this seriously. a lot of sports is about having dumb arguments

and yeah, again, pecco does gradually build up his level over the weekend. more of a valentino than a casey, it's fair to say. and that'll hurt him in the sprint format - which I talked about a bit recently while going through casey's latest interview about how sprints are satan's providence:

so yeah, casey thinks that if anything there isn't enough time to work on set-up, and mat oxley thinks it's rubbish to say pecco relies on sprint data to be better on sunday. (as I said in that post, I do find it fun if unsurprising that casey is so virulently anti-sprints, because you'd think a lot of aspects of the format - including less time for everyone for working on set-ups - really would have suited him. keeping it real.) so on the whole... y'know. maybe he just gets better over the course of the weekend. it's been known to happen. there's actually some pretty significant ways in which the current version of the sport isn't all that pecco-friendly, from the shitty michelin front tyre we're keeping for another year to the sprint format we appear to be stuck with. it's just that he also happens to be on the best bike - and the fact that he's winning a lot but simultaneously isn't highly rated by fans makes people want to believe that the current series is 100% ideal for him

a lot of fans are loathe to admit pecco might actually be a good rider so they'll find basically everything to justify that prior. including getting into increasingly conspiratorial territory. but my actual take is this - if pecco has been gaming the system so expertly that he is somehow the only guy able to take full advantage of everyone else's data, so shrewd and cunning that he can spread magic dust on his bike so that he suddenly leaps ahead of jorge, such a dastardly operator that he can steal the set-up that poor jorge perfected on friday morning to fix his bike five minutes before the sunday race, then... good. I support it. I hope he's cheating. the more unearned the success is, the better in my books. long live corporate espionage and foul play

[lostandbackagain]

im blaming it on my distrust of landy as an author but skulduggery pleasant becoming pretty explicitly a story of regret is a very welcome development

from "regret never won war, valkyrie, and sorry isn't a big enough word for what I'm feeling" and "for your sake I'd change everything," to valkyrie's self-atonement arc she'll probably be working on until the day she dies, china's whole life being built upon actions she wishes she could undo, people who didn't say "I love you" back and now they never can, chasing alternative futures until they become self-fulfilling prophecies because they already want a do-over, alternate dimensions where someone made one single decent choice and changed everything for better or worse--every book is drenched in "I wish it had been different"

[tangledinink]

I can imagine the first cycle after moving. Probably Leo because Donnie likely has internal scarring, so leo goes through the process of laying his eggs, panics, his brother can't help, and finally, *finally* they ask for help. It's not willingly. It's not for fun. It's purely necessity. It's purely because there's *literally noone else* and the idea of telling anyone at all is so scary that the way they do so is in a note. Splinter sits them down and basically walks them through "You're safe, you're fine. We can handle this however you feel most comfortable, including getting you both on blockers if you prefer" and they just.... sigh. For the first time, there's *someone else* in their circle, and it's willing and it's warm, and it's *safe*. There will be tears.

Yes, except I'm not convinced that either of them could stand to tell anyone. Even if it was literally life or death (which it has been before,) I'm not sure if either of them could bear to give up that information. Donnie is finally, finally away from the people who hurt him when he got found out last time, and even though logically, he knows that it's different here, he's absolutely petrified of the thought that the same thing will happen again and it won't be over anymore. He's still horrified by the idea of anyone else knowing about Leo when he's gone to such lengths for so long to protect him, and Leo is likewise terrified in the same way. They've spent years with this being their more closely guarded secret, and that's going to be really difficult to give up.

But it's really not a secret they'll be able to keep for long.

They're in a completely different environment, with far less space and privacy. They're both stressed as hell and Donnie WAS on birth control and taking all sorts of vitamins and supplements to make sure he didn't eggbind again and now he's suddenly not and it's not only messing with his body, it's fucking scary. It literally keeps them both up at night. Neither of them know how to wash blood out of clothes or sheets. There's no private en suite bathroom they can sequester themselves away in. They're both literally making themselves sick with anxiety trying to deal with this, and they're used to handling this on their own, this is routine for them, but they're not used to all of this.

They'd probably metaphorically limp through a few cycles before their family puts it together and gently confronts them.

Venus probably figures it out first. She's pretty smart, and incredibly observant, and after all-- she quite literally experiences the exact same thing. April may not lay eggs, but I think she'd be able to get the idea after a bit as well. And while I think Splinter would realize something was wrong pretty quickly, Draxum would probably realize what was wrong first. Splinter has April, so he has a little bit of experience in this realm, but Draxum has Venus and so he has far more experience.

And so when they do sit them down and talk with them, it's going to be really scary at first. And then they get to, "you're safe, you're fine, we can handle this however you feel the most comfortable. It will be okay. No one will hurt you."

And then there's finally other people in the know, in the circle, people who will actually help them. And yes-- there will definitely be tears.

[karnaca78]

Just some doodles because these characters plague me with thoughts.