#the brave little toaster game

[tiffanyelectricity]

HAPPY 37TH ANNIVERSARY THE BRAVE LITTLE TOASTER

Artwork I've made to celebrate the film, I'm also using it for my fangame here- https://www.roblox.com/games/2925008743/The-Brave-Little-Toaster-Roleplay

[muppet-hell]

Brave Little Toaster is an amazing movie

@cryptidcrispin and I found the roblox rp

Works of art

[hostess-of-horror]

So, um.

The Brave Little Toaster...

plus 9...

...equals: It Takes Two.

[lee-blogs]

Gosh i wish i could have a sleepover with one, or some (make it a party!), of my besties...

I'm just, super in the mood to watch comfort movies and eat a couple snacks while being cozy with my friends

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Sandra Newman’s “Julia”

The first chapter of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four has a fantastic joke that nearly everyone misses: when Julia, Winston Smith's love interest, is introduced, she has oily hands and a giant wrench, which she uses in her "mechanical job on one of the novel-writing machines":

https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt

That line just kills me every time I re-read the book – Orwell, a novelist, writing a dystopian future in which novels are written by giant, clanking mechanisms. Later on, when Winston and Julia begin their illicit affair, we get more detail:

She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the finished product. She 'didn't much care for reading,' she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.

I always assumed Orwell was subtweeting his publishers and editors here, and you can only imagine that the editor who asked Orwell to tweak the 1984 manuscript must have felt an uncomfortable parallel between their requests and the notional Planning Committee and Rewrite Squad at the Ministry of Truth.

I first read 1984 in the early winter of, well, 1984, when I was thirteen years old. I was on a family trip that included as visit to my relatives in Leningrad, and the novel made a significant impact on me. I immediately connected it to the canon of dystopian science fiction that I was already avidly consuming, and to the geopolitics of a world that seemed on the brink of nuclear devastation. I also connected it to my own hopes for the nascent field of personal computing, which I'd gotten an early start on, when my father – then a computer science student – started bringing home dumb terminals and acoustic couplers from his university in the mid-1970s. Orwell crystallized my nascent horror at the oppressive uses of technology (such as the automated Mutually Assured Destruction nuclear systems that haunted my nightmares) and my dreams of the better worlds we could have with computers.

It's not an overstatement to say that the rest of my life has been about this tension. It's no coincidence that I wrote a series of "Little Brother" novels whose protagonist calls himself w1n5t0n:

https://craphound.com/littlebrother/Cory_Doctorow_-_Little_Brother.htm

I didn't stop with Orwell, of course. I wrote a whole series of widely read, award-winning stories with the same titles as famous sf tales, starting with "Anda's Game" ("Ender's Game"):

https://www.salon.com/2004/11/15/andas_game/

And "I, Robot":

https://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_-_Overclocked_-_I_Robot.html

"The Martian Chronicles":

https://escapepod.org/2019/10/03/escape-pod-700-martian-chronicles-part-1/

"True Names":

https://archive.org/details/TrueNames

"The Man Who Sold the Moon":

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/05/22/the-man-who-sold-the-moon/

and "The Brave Little Toaster":

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_212

Writing stories about other stories that you hate or love or just can't get out of your head is a very old and important literary tradition. As EL Doctorow (no relation) writes in his essay "Genesis," the Hebrews stole their Genesis story from the Babylonians, rewriting it to their specifications:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/41520/creationists-by-e-l-doctorow/

As my "famous title" stories and Little Brother books show, this work needn't be confined to antiquity. Modern copyright may be draconian, but it contains exceptions ("fair use" in the US, "fair dealing" in many other places) that allow for this kind of creative reworking. One of the most important fair use cases concerns The Wind Done Gone, Alice Randall's 2001 retelling of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind from the perspective of the enslaved characters, which was judged to be fair use after Mitchell's heirs tried to censor the book:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suntrust_Bank_v._Houghton_Mifflin_Co.

In ruling for Randall, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals emphasized that she had "fully employed those conscripted elements from Gone With the Wind to make war against it." Randall used several of Mitchell's most famous lines, "but vest[ed] them with a completely new significance":

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/268/1257/608446/

The Wind Done Gone is an excellent book, and both its text and its legal controversy kept springing to mind as I read Sandra Newman's wonderful novel Julia, which retells 1984 from the perspective of Julia, she of the oily hands the novel-writing machine:

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/julia-sandra-newman?variant=41467936636962

Julia is the kind of fanfic that I love, in the tradition of both Wind Done gone and Rosenkrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead, in which a follow-on author takes on the original author's throwaway world-building with deadly seriousness, elucidating the weird implications and buried subtexts of all the stuff and people moving around in the wings and background of the original.

For Newman, the starting point here is Julia, an enigmatic lover who comes to Winston with all kinds of rebellious secrets – tradecraft for planning and executing dirty little assignations and acquiring black market goods. Julia embodies a common contradiction in the depiction of young women (she is some twenty years younger than Winston): on the one hand, she is a "native" of the world, while Winston is a late arrival, carrying around all his "oldthink" baggage that leaves him perennially baffled, terrified and angry; on the other hand, she's a naive "girl," who "doesn't much care for reading," and lacks the intellectual curiosity that propels Winston through the text.

This contradiction is the cleavage line that Newman drives her chisel into, fracturing Orwell's world in useful, fascinating, engrossing ways. For Winston, the world of 1984 is totalitarian: the Party knows all, controls all and misses nothing. To merely think a disloyal thought is to be doomed, because the omnipotent, omniscient, and omnicompetent Party will sense the thought and mark you for torture and "vaporization."

Orwell's readers experience all of 1984 through Winston's eyes and are encouraged to trust his assessment of his situation. But Newman brings in a second point of view, that of Julia, who is indeed far more worldly than Winston. But that's not because she's younger than him – it's because she's more provincial. Julia, we learn, grew up outside of the Home Counties, where the revolution was incomplete and where dissidents – like her parents – were sent into exile. Julia has experienced the periphery of the Party's power, the places where it is frayed and incomplete. For Julia, the Party may be ruthless and powerful, but it's hardly omnicompetent. Indeed, it's rather fumbling.

Which makes sense. After all, if we take Winston at his word and assume that every disloyal citizen of Oceania is arrested, tortured and murdered, where would that leave Oceania? Even Kim Jong Un can't murder everyone who hates him, or he'd get awfully lonely, and then awfully hungry.

Through Julia's eyes, we experience Oceania as a paranoid autocracy, corrupt and twitchy. We witness the obvious corollary of a culture of denunciation and arrest: the ruling Party of such an institution must be riddled with internecine struggle and backstabbing, to the point of paralyzed dysfunction. The Orwellian trick of switching from being at war with Eastasia to Eurasia and back again is actually driven by real military setbacks – not just faked battles designed to stir up patriotic fervor. The Party doesn't merely claim to be under assault from internal and external enemies – it actually is.

Julia is also perfectly positioned to uncover the vast blank spots in Winston's supposed intellectual curiosity, all the questions he doesn't ask – about her, about the Party, and about the world. I love this trope and used it myself, in Attack Surface, the third "Little Brother" book, which is told from the point of view of Marcus's frenemy Masha:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531/attacksurface

Through Julia, we come to understand the seemingly omniscient, omnipotent Party as fumbling sadists. The Thought Police are like MI5, an Island of Misfit Toys where the paranoid, the stupid, the vicious and the thuggish come together to ruin the lives of thousands, in such a chaotic and pointless manner that their victims find themselves spinning devastatingly clever explanations for their behavior:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9-3149-963f-47bea720b460

And, as with Nineteen Eighty-Four, Julia is a first-rate novel, expertly plotted, with fantastic, nail-biting suspense and many smart turns and clever phrases. Newman is doing Orwell, and, at times, outdoing him. In her hands, Orwell – like Winston – is revealed as a kind of overly credulous romantic who can't believe that anyone as obviously stupid and deranged as the state's representatives could be kicking his ass so very thoroughly.

This was, in many ways, the defining trauma and problem of Orwell's life, from his origin story, in which he is shot through the throat by a fascist: sniper during the Spanish Civil War:

https://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/soldiers/george-orwell-shot.html

To his final days, when he developed a foolish crush on a British state spy and tried to impress her by turning his erstwhile comrades in to her:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwell%27s_list

Newman's feminist retelling of Orwell is as much about puncturing the myth of male competence as it is about revealing the inner life, agency, and personhood of swooning love-interests. As someone who loves Orwell – but not unconditionally – I was moved, impressed, and delighted by Julia.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/28/novel-writing-machines/#fanfic

[masquayla-the-splendid]

Oh no. Not again.

Bolts4Brains update 10/8/24:

(I'm logging these by date instead of number so I don't lose count like last time.)

I don't have anything major for SL's anniversary this year, other than I finished the instrumental rework of Bolts4Brains, (the vocals still need work,) and the first clip has been animated.

I had like a little of it done before I was like hey wait a minute, Fnaf's 10 year anniversary only happens once. And then shifted my focus to Paranormal Powerhouse.

Visually, the goal is to make this as 2016-early 2017 SL as possible. I don't know how else to describe the type of synesthesia I get for this game, other than it's like when you watch the Brave Toaster movie as a kid because it's a cartoon, get traumatized, and then years later find out that movie was actually intended for like college students in animation. That, combined with classic 2014/15 fnaf, and futuristic wacky-pomo.

So like a spectrum of this:

The magenta-deep blue color scheme is also significant. Any time the Funtimes are preforming, they're in a pink spotlight. Otherwise, it's very cold and blue.

(I have no clue where the last image comes from, but it's suspiciously SL elevator shaped.)

[panthera-dei]

Technomancy 101

Hi, friends! I'm back with another witchy FAQ from the past couple weeks. This time from the world of tech magic!

Here are some quick TL;DR technomancy tips for those who may not want to read the long FAQs post beneath the cut:

1. Chest spells (like a jar spell but with a chest filled with in game items that match the intent)

2. Poppet spells using the game characters by giving them items or altering their names/appearances

3. Similar to a chest spell but not necessarily magic per se - using chests or sheds with in-game items as altars and/or offerings

4. Build a shrine / altar / temple with offerings, or leave an item such as a torch in the game world as an offering

5. Burn/bury/destroy ingredients to activate a spell with the desired effect

6. Write an affirmation or a spell on a sign or other in-game item and destroy it to activate as a sigil

7. Build a golem or animal pen or something as a servitor for protection

8. Use some form of sympathetic magic connecting in-game items to IRL items

9. Light sticks, flashlights, plastic lightsabers, and toy sonic screwdrivers make *awesome* wands, especially if they light up and make noise.

10. The possibilities are limited to your imagination!!

(I am choosing Wittgenstein from The Brave Little Toaster movies as my mascot for tech magic, simply because I like him and because I can. Image credit - Fandom Wiki.)

What is technomancy?: Technomancy, techno magic, and tech magic are all terms for a form of magic that utilizes common modern technology, such as smartphones and video games. Technically, “technomancy” could refer specifically to divination with technology; however, in my experience, the term usually has a broader meaning in common usage. I personally tend to use these terms interchangeably, with perhaps a slight preference for technomancy, since I learned that name first.

What are some forms of technomancy?: Common forms of technomancy include digital sigils, emoji spells, shufflemancy, video game spells, and video game altars.

How do I create a digital sigil?: The ways are about as unlimited as creating a physical sigil on paper. You can use a drawing app on a smartphone or tablet, find a digital sigil generator online, use a photo editor on a picture, or even add a string of charged letters to an email signature (just make sure they blend in!).

OK, and what's the deal with emoji spells?: Yes, this is an actual thing (though not a thing that I'm particularly experienced with). They're pretty straightforward. They can be done like a sigil - string emojis together and charge them. Or like an actual spell - put them together and send to cast, or like to charge and send/reblog to cast.

What kind of games can you use for technomancy?: Any of them. Minecraft is a very popular one. So is Stardew Valley. Skyrim and other RPGs are other common choices. As with other forms of magic, the only real limit is your imagination.

What kind of spells can you cast in a game?:

Chest spells - like digital jar spells - are very common.

Poppet spells are another common choice. In games that allow you to create a character, or in games where you can give items to an NPC, you can turn the character into a poppet of someone and give them an item to cast the spell. For example, if I wanted emotional strength, I could create a Skyrim character as a poppet for myself, and have the character drink a strength potion to cast a spell of strength for myself in the real world.

Burying or burning items in games like Minecraft can be done to cast spells that are similar to physical spells that require burning a paper, bay leaf, or other ingredient.

Enchanting! Use the enchanting function in a video game like Skyrim or Minecraft to enchant a physical object. For example, you might choose to connect a physical scarf to a shield in Skyrim, and when you enchant the in-game shield with a damage resistance effect, voila! You now have a fancy enchanted scarf to protect yourself from spiritual attacks.

Customize your avatar to your advantage! In games such as Sky: Children Of The Light, where you can accessorize your character, you can equip different items to cast a different spell on yourself. For example, you might use the Saluting Captain's staff as a cosmetic to cast a spell of protection on yourself, or you could use a particular cape as a spiritual veil.

For deity work & spirit work, consider creating a space in your game (e.g. a chest, shed, home, biome, character, etc.) dedicated to the entities you work with. For example, temples and altars in Minecraft are common. Devotional sheds and chests are popular in Stardew Valley. I’ve named some appropriate Pokemon after an entity or dedicated the critter to them. You can even place a torch or candle in the game world as an offering.

There are lots more out there, too! This list is a starting point, not a limitation. Use your imagination and swap ideas with others, too!

How exactly does all of this work?? How is it possible?!: OK, so the principle behind tech magic is that you're harnessing the energy of multiple sources.

First, the device itself (and if you're using something like a Switch, the cartridge or other physical media). Each of these items has its own materials - electricity, glass and metal, etc. And each of those materials has a magical property that you can use... Glass and metal come from the Earth and have their own correspondences, while electricity is pure energy in itself.

Second, you have the energy of symbolism, or as I like to think of it with a butchered sociology term, symbolic interactionism - i.e., the idea that we create our own reality (or our *perception* of reality) via symbols. In other words, the power of correspondences! A candle is still a candle whether it's physical or digital. Lapis lazuli has the same qualities in this world that it does in a pixelated version. And so forth. So when you use the correspondences in digital spell work, provided that you raise the energy, it can and does have real world consequences. Similar to doing magic in the astral as opposed to the physical world... you are making a conscious decision to connect a digital item to an effect either in the astral and/or physical worlds.

Finally, you're also harnessing the power of belief and the energy of attention, which is where the chaos magic concepts start to come in. The digital worlds are real because you believe they are and you pour parts of your energy and personality into them - and so do *millions* of other people, in many cases. All of that energy is sort of like a reservoir in these games and it's just waiting to be harvested for spell work!

So… This is another subset of chaos magic, then.: Pretty much, yes. I haven't seen it categorized as anything else yet, except for in those cases where technomancy is given its own category.

And what did you mean by “energy of symbolism” again?: Correspondences. Both traditional ones and your own. For example, obsidian corresponds with protection IRL. So if you were making a chest spell in Minecraft for protection, you'd want to consider adding an obsidian block to your spell. Some of this is also stuff that you can brainstorm on your own and explore! Like for example, in the Elder Scrolls series, there are several plants and items that don't exist IRL, such as the corkbulb root - but in the game, that item can be used to make a potion of healing, so for me, it has a healing correspondence. Also, if the game you’re playing has spells already, you can consider how to adapt those spells to affect the real world in a logical, realistic way! Many pop culture magicians have done a great job of turning Pokemon moves into real spells, for example. So feel free to play around (pun intended) and see what works best for you!

How come you only mentioned shufflemancy once in this whole entire post??: That, my friend, needs to be a post for a later date. I assure you, I absolutely can (and probably already have, and probably eventually will) write an entire post about shufflemancy.

How come your formatting is crap?: Because I wrote all of this on a smartphone and pieced it into a post with the mobile app. Bear with me. XD

Where do I learn more and fact check you, smarty-pants?: Tumblr. The answer is usually Tumblr for this kind of thing. Or sometimes Discord. Like pop culture magic, techno magic is simply very new. Some tags to search include tech magic, techno magic, technomancy, video game magic, etc.

[freakartack]

Hi, I’m a big fan of your wario ware comics, you probably already finish the games on the switch, so I would like to ask for your opinion about Orbulon father and ship (who is alive and it’s like a pet) thanks

THANK YOU!

OK so my opinion on both of those is so disproportionately butthurt that I'm almost embarrassed to put it here. But I don't like either of them and I think they conflict with his previous characterization so greatly that I cannot tell a lie it did make me five-year-old angry.

Papa Orb: The fact that I have beef with an entity named Papa Orb is honestly laughable and the epitome of Extremely Online Gamer. I don't even hate him that much. But what I hate is that it had been previously implied (to my understanding) that orbulon was a Whole Adult Alien and was simply small because that's the kind of animal he is. When they crunched him in Gold they also made him act far more childlike, which I hated, but you could still reasonably interpret him as simply an airhead that happened to be short. But Move It comes along and gives you a flashback of Papa Orb (grown-up, twice his size, same animal) bestowing upon him The Oinker. So what is he now!!! What have they done!!!! This is NOT the nebbish middle-aged pseudo-intellectual we know and love.......DELETED!!!

The Oinker 2.0: I already had opinions on the oinker being downsized from a massive rickety spaceship to a tiny segway he never exits, so this already started me off on a bad foot. But I ALSO am mad that they suddenly made it sapient because in all the decades he's crashed that thing into asteroids and mailboxes and shit it has never been or been treated like it was a creature. Sure it had facial expressions, but so did dribble & spitz's taxi and mona's hat from Touched. It's just cartoon things. So now, we've got the retcon that the vehicle orbulon has been inadvertently beating up over the years is actually a horse and his friend. I don't like that! And, more selfishly, I simply don't think Orbulon is the type of character who would be friends with his car. I will admit I project a lot of my own traits onto my favorite characters, but I will never let that make me mischaracterize them on purpose, because I am an anal pedant. As someone posting from a Brave Little Toaster icon, I strongly believe that Orbulon would not be friends with his car. AND HE WASN'T!! For years!! It's just such a weird retcon and I don't know what they're going to do with it in future games but right now I can say No Sir I Don't Like It. DELETED!!!!

TL;DR bad

[sprintingowl]

Your Best Game Bundle

From 9/22/23 to 10/19/23, the Your Best Game bundle is live.

This is a collection of 52 tabletop rpgs from across the indie, united by the theme of designers putting their best foot forward.

Predictably, they are very weird.

There is an emotions-based tactical combat game featuring hamsters. There is a Brave Little Toaster adventure game. There's Arthurian legends running on a system build for modern special ops. There's Only One Bed.

My own contribution is a sad and reflective game about weasels in a cyberpunk future, inspired by a Carly Rae Jepsen song.

So, like. Get strange. Experience The Bundle. Or just click around and see if there's any designers whose work you like and you want to follow.

There's a ton of options here, and I hope they'll brighten your gaming shelf.

[carriagelamp]

Summer really is just a time to read and read and read as much as absolutely possible. We’ve had some rainy weather as well, so it’s been very nice to have a cut to the heat and be able to sit by an open window, with tea and a book, and listen to a summer rain!

Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

Subheader: “The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made” which about sums it up. This is a nonfiction book that looks into the rough development cycle of some big name games, including Dragon Age Inquisition, Stardew Valley, The Witcher 3, Shovelknight… and plenty others besides! It was fascinating to hear about the highs and lows, what worked and what didn’t… especially for some of the games that I’ve actually played! It was just narrative enough to keep me interested, never felt overly dry, and was accessible to someone like me who is only like… a periphery gamer at best. A really enjoyable read. 

The Brave Little Toaster

I never knew this was originally a book, I only knew of it as a movie! It’s written to be a “modern fairytale” about appliances who have been seemingly abandoned in a summer cabin. When their “master” doesn’t return over several years, a few of the remaining, functional appliances decide to set off into the woods in an effort to find him again. It’s a harrowing adventure with many obstacles for them to overcome, and some honestly rather unsettling scenes — those weren’t only reserved for the movie! Ultimately the movie and book have some significant differences, but if you liked one it would be worth trying the other. A very neat kids novel.

The Brides of High Hill (Singing Hills Cycle)

I’m completely enraptured with this series and I don’t know how I’m going to wait for the next novella ;^; it doesn’t even have a release date yet to my knowledge! Augh! You can see my reviews of the early books in the series for more detail, but the general premise is that it follows a cleric from a monastery which is specifically tasked to collect and record stories (both historical accounts and fictional tales) to bring back to be recorded in the archives. With this as a framing device, Chih travels all over an intriguing fantasy world with their magical bird companion, getting into strange adventures, meeting interesting characters, and hearing stories within stories. In this one, Chih finds themself accompanying a young lady who is travelling to marry an older man of questionable character…

The End of the Line

A youth novel that takes place in Holland during the Nazi occupation. Brothers Lars and Hans run a street tram, and are shocked one day when they witness the Nazis find and arrest a Jewish woman on their very tram. What leaves them even more shocked, is what the woman is able to stealthily leave behind: her young daughter. Scared, overwhelmed, but unable to bear abandoning the child completely, the brothers end up sneaking her through the city and back to their own home, to try to figure out what they can possibly do with a Jewish child during the Holocaust.

Finna

An interesting little novella. It takes place in a fictional “Ikea” called LitenVärld. However, this company is known to experience strange occurrences from time to time… wormholes will occasionally open in their stores, linking to other LitenVärld in countless other universes. At one time they had entire teams trained specifically in dealing with these wormholes and ensuring customer safety, but overtime there’s been budget cuts and layoffs and no nothing exists but old tech and dated instructional videos. When a customer’s grandmother disappears in one of these wormholes, a pair of employees get strong armed into “volunteering” to take on the task of entering the wormhole and finding her once again. It’s a fairly creative scifi adventure that offers some decent (though not subtle) criticism of modern life and capitalism. 

…Not a bad read, I enjoyed it, but honestly if you want “Weird Upsetting Ikea Story That Mocks Retail Life” then you should really go read Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix instead which, imo, was a much tighter version of this sort of story, with a much more effectively delivered message. Seriously, just go read Horrorstör, one of my favourite reads from this year so far.

Heaven Official's Blessing v7 (TGCF )

Heaven Official’s Blessing just gets better and better! We’re in boss fight territory and it’s getting so intense! This series has way more Gundam battles than I expected but honestly I am here for it! And I’m such a sucker for any story where all the friends (?) you made along the way begin to amass to help in the big final confrontation! Ahhh. So good, so good.

If you haven't heard of this one: it's the story of Xie Lian, a prince who ascended as a god... only to be banished. And then ascend again. And then get banished again. The series starts off after his third ascension (to the exasperation of everyone in Heaven) and is a gradual series of adventures and mysteries that tie together events of the past and building tensions in the present. It's lots of fun, with a ton of humour and heart built into it to cut the tragedy

Night Witches

More WWII, this time not a youth novel! Night Witches takes place in Russia, beginning during the Battle of Stalingrad. It follows a teenage girl whose father is already gone to fight, and who is forced to watch as both her mother and grandmother die to German bombing. After losing her mother, her only goal is to find the elusive Night Witches — an entirely female and very infamous branch of the Russian air force. Having grown up flying with her father, she’s determined that there she can do the most good, and fights her way across a war-torn city in her effort to join the forces to repel the Nazis. Night Witches (the actual, historical Night Witches, which are cool in and of themselves and very worth looking up if you’ve never heard of them before) were known for flying a special type of light-weight plane which could go much quieter and much slower than other planes, allowing them a shocking amount of stealth and maneuverability on bombing missions.

The writing of this one wasn’t my favourite, but the subject matter was interesting enough to buoy me through it, especially in how it portrayed some of the absolute horror that goes along with urban warfare and trying to fight with scant resources, under the Soviet regime, during a Russian winter. Lots of tragedy.

More About Paddington / Paddington Goes To Town / Paddington On Top /Love From Paddington / Paddington’s Finest Hour

Travelling to the UK in July got me on a Paddington Bear kick! I got to see his statue in Paddington station and honestly it was too delightful not to drag me back into the books. I’d only ever read a couple as a kid, so this was both a reread and a chance to read some of the stories I’ve never heard before, these were especially nice as audiobooks to listen to as I was falling asleep. For some reason my Libby is missing quite a few so I mostly listened to later ones in the series. I particularly enjoyed Love From Paddington which was a different format from the rest of the series and kind of a need deviation.

If you’ve somehow never heard of Paddington, these books are about a young bear “from Darkest Peru” who immigrates to England when his grandmother enters the Home For Retired Bears and can no longer care for him. He’s adopted by the Brown family, and the books are a recount of the everyday mishaps and misadventures he gets up to around London. They’re sweet and charming and funny! 

Pinocchio

I’ve never read the original story of Pinocchio and I found it a very interesting contrast to the Disney version. It’s very much a coming of age story, in which Pinocchio, a wooden puppet — who can serve as a stand-in for any child — is constantly confronted with a need to balance what sounds enjoyable in the moment versus what is a morally upright choice that often requires more effort. He’s constantly being tricked, fooled, or lured off the moral path, but is never portrayed as irredeemable. He’s a child who is “trying to become a real boy” and is always given chances to fix his problems and return to his loving father. It’s a sweet story with a satisfyingly harrowing adventure and lots of fun naughtiness!

I specifically got this version because of Gris Grimly's art, because he helped out with Guillermo Del Toro's film, and man it was worth it. The art was so cool and creepy!

The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System v1

Now that I’ve reached the end of Heaven Official’s Blessing and have previously finished Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation I inevitably have to start MXTX’s first series, The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System. This was the one I was most leary about since, as a rule, I don’t really enjoy isekai stories, but I enjoyed her other two series so much that I figured it was worth giving the first book a chance. And boy! Am I glad I did! The first book started off like a gunshot, it pulls you right into the action and it really doesn’t slow down! Shen Yuan, upon dying while furiously reading the worst webnovel he’s ever seen, finds himself transported into the story… specifically into the villain who is destined to be torn apart by the protagonist during a revenge plot! From there, Shen Yuan — now Shen Qingqiu — begins to desperately scheme how he can change his character enough without becoming OOC (which the mysterious “System” that governs this world won’t allow) while still giving him a chance to avoid a horrible death.

This book is hilariously satirical without ever feeling dull or jaded, which is an impressive mix. Shen Qingqiu may scoff at the ridiculous tropes of this world or the author’s poor world-building, but he’s just as swept up in it all as anyone else. He’s a cunning, calculating character, while also managing to run around like a chicken with its head chopped off, rife with misunderstandings and humour and adventure. I’m very very excited to continue!

Unusual Chickens for the Exceptional Poultry Farmer

I wasn’t sure about this book at first, I almost quit part way in, but in the end I’m really glad I kept with it! It ended up being much more charming and delightful than I anticipated! This is a youth novel about a girl whose family has just moved to their late great uncle’s farm. While trying to get her feet under her, she comes across a catalogue advertising “unusual chicken for the exceptional poultry farmer”. Though her parents don’t seem keen on having animals on the farm, she decides to write to the company. To her surprise though, she doesn’t need to wait for an order of “usual chickens” because it would appear her great uncle already had some… and she’s found one. And “unusual” really doesn’t even begin to cover it. Things only get stranger as the woman from the catalogue writes her back, and when the first attempt is made to steal this strange new chicken.

Winner Takes All (Doctor Who)

This is a standard fare Doctor Who novel. It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t good. It was an enjoyable little thing to read just for the sake of reading something relaxing and Doctor Who related. This one follows the Ninth Doctor and Rose who have returned back to Earth so that Rose can visit her mom, and along the way they get to learn all about a strange new give-away that’s being promoted in the local shops. There’s lottery tickets and free vacations and a new video game and all sorts of curious things… including some unexpected disappearances. 

If you like Doctor Who and feel like reading an extra story about Nine and Rose, this one is as fine as any, especially considering that there are some real stinkers out there. The story is compelling enough with some decent stakes, Nine and Rose is a dynamic I always really enjoy and want more of, and the characters they introduce for this story are reasonably enjoyable. A very comfortable middle of the road read.

[tiffanyelectricity]

THE BRAVE LITTLE TOASTER FANDOM RISE AND SHINE!

For Toaster's 37th Anniversary I've lovingly recreated the five brave appliances in 3D ,the master's cottage and the surrounding forest!

Link to Roblox game! https://www.roblox.com/games/2925008743/The-Brave-Little-Toaster-Roleplay

[starlightsuffered]

Ghosts (part 1)

Info - trans fem reader, ghosts, abandoned by family, series, blood

I carried my suitcases through the rickety door of my new house. It was dingy. A dark mark stained the floor of the bedroom. There was an oddness about the place. It was both homey and frightening.

I felt like there had been great love here. Every wall felt as though it’d been important and adored. If walls could speak, I knew this place would have a story to tell. I was reminded of the novella called the Brave Little Toaster that I’d read, and of the horror video game about a house that missed its previous owners so much it drove new buyers insane. I shuddered all over.

This would have to do, even though it felt haunted. Every step I took forward I felt like my body was weighted down by something. I didn’t know why I felt…. Almost contaminated.

“A ghost would love it here,” I mumbled.

I began the unpacking process. I didn’t have much. There wasn’t a lot I could pack quickly when my parents had decided I had no home with them anymore.

I was sweaty once I’d put the appropriate boxes in each room. This house had a rickety old AC unit that wasn’t nearly strong enough to cool the whole house. I grabbed a cup and used the sink. There was no water filter here. There was no ice button. I would have a bit of trouble getting used to this life but it would be worth it.

I surveyed my new abode. It was sparse but definitely liveable. I looked and looked until a strange anger over took me. I was prone to it. Biological. The amount of times I’d seen my parents fly into a rage was uncanny. At least I had a reason for the unjust component of it. They had no excuses.

I lowered my head and sobbed. The tension weighed heavy on me. It could’ve been cut like a knife. I needed a relief.

I decided to breathe slowly and take a tour of where I was living. I walked slowly. I made sure to sip water as I did. The technique of calming myself was working well.

My eyes landed on a door I hadn’t taken into account before. I cocked my head. I didn’t know about this door. The house was so small I didn’t think I could miss anything.

The door looked somehow like it was imbued with a sort of cosmic energy. I tiptoed as if there were anyone else in this house I needed to be wary about. I took the handle in a tentative hand. I noticed I was shaking just a little bit.

I took a deep breath and pushed open the door. I gasped, hand fluttering to my mouth as I took in the sight the small broom closet.

The walls were dripping what very convincingly looked like fresh blood. Words and pictures were made on the unsanded walls. There were hundreds of pictures of the same girl. Polaroids, but some in more vibrant colour as the years progressed.

I played nervously with the necklace around my neck as I stepped inside. I swore it was colder inside the closet. I tried to read the messy script on the walls.

“Maren”

“Love”

“Sacrifice”

“Eat”

“A meal for my love”

“I live inside you”

The phrases made me shudder. I also gently a bit nauseous. The girl in the photos must be Maren. On a pulpit, looking almost like an altar or shrine, was a book. Faded writing journaled about a young man’s life. I didn’t have time to read it and my mind was spinning.

“Do I scare you?” Asked a voice. I jumped out of my skin. When I turned to see the culprit, no one was there.

@pmak2002 @softhecreator @plutoispurplw @sp1deyyf4ngz @seungcheol17daddy @jesschalamet @vvsdreaming

[pinkmoondoll9shihtzu]

land before time used to have me so choked up as a kid 😭😭😭😭😭 and brave little toaster.... thats what they need to be showing kids now not fuckin uhh bluey. kids need see depictions of Rawness and Devastation that shit was like a high to me and all my make believe games were so good for it

[toasterman247]

brave little toaster fighter tier list brave little toaster radio tournament ban Kirby infinite combo suckies brave little toaster brave little toaster EVO vod 2016 Blanky combo guide how to counter mishmash BLTF brave little toaster all ultimates FPS drop on mars stage how to make frag videos fighting game sony vegas crack worthless remix royalty free how to report youtube comments brave little toaster wave 2 dlc brave little toaster wave 2 dlc release date is the brave little toaster wave 2 dlc real did the brave little toaster devs go bankrupt will toy story tussle be the toaster killer lampy nude mod

honestly gobsmacked at this ask I got because I cant tell if this is like some AI info scraping bot trying to farm interactions or something, but completely confused why it would be an Anon ask if so... just completely dumbfounded

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Quinque gazump linkdump

On OCTOBER 23 at 7PM, I'll be in DECATUR, presenting my novel THE BEZZLE at EAGLE EYE BOOKS.

It's Saturday and any fule kno that this is the day for a linkdump, in which the links that couldn't be squeezed into the week's newsletter editions get their own showcase. Here's the previous 23 linkdumps:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

Start your weekend with some child's play! Ada & Zangemann is a picture book by Matthias Kirschner and Sandra Brandstätter of Free Software Foundation Europe, telling the story of a greedy inventor who ensnares a town with his proprietary, remote-brickable gadgets, and Ada, his nemesis, a young girl who reverse engineers them and lets their users seize the means of computation:

https://fsfe.org/activities/ada-zangemann/index.en.html

Ada & Zangemann is open access – you can share it, adapt it, and sell it as you see fit – and has been translated into several languages. Now, there's a cartoon version, an animated adaptation that is likewise open access, with digital assets for your remixing pleasure:

https://fsfe.org/activities/ada-zangemann//movie

Figuring out how to talk to kids about important subjects is a clarifying exercise. Back in the glory days of SNL, Eddie Murphy lampooned Fred "Mr" Rogers style of talking to kids, and it was indeed very funny:

https://snl.fandom.com/wiki/Mr._Robinson

But Mr Rogers' rhetorical style wasn't as simple as "talk slowly and use small words" – the "Fredish" dialect that Mr Rogers created was thoughtful, empathic, inclusive, and very effective:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/09/the-nine-rules-of-freddish-the-positive-inclusive-empathic-language-of-mr-rogers/

Lots of writers have used the sing-songy fairytale style of children's stories to make serious political points (see, e.g. Animal Farm). My own attempt at this was my 2011 short story "The Brave Little Toaster," for MIT Tech Review's annual sf series. If the title sounds familiar, that's because I nicked it from Tom Disch's tale of the same name, as part of my series of stolen title stories:

https://locusmag.com/2012/05/cory-doctorow-a-prose-by-any-other-name/

My Toaster story is a tale of IoT gone wild, in which the nightmare of a world of "smart" devices that exert control over their owners is shown to be a nightmare. A work colleague sent me this adaptation of the story as part of an English textbook, with lots of worksheet-style exercises. I'd never seen this before, and it's very fun:

http://ourenglishclass.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2024/09/bravetoaster.pdf

If you like my "Brave Little Toaster," you'll likely enjoy my novella "Unauthorized Bread," which appears in my 2019 collection Radicalized and is currently being adapted as a middle-grades graphic novel by Blue Delliquanti for Firstsecond:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

Childlike parables have their place, but just because something fits in a "just so" story, that doesn't make it true. Cryptocurrency weirdos desperately need to learn this lesson. The foundation of cryptocurrency is a fairytale about the origin of money, a mythological marketplace in which freely trading individuals who struggled to find a "confluence of needs." If you wanted to trade one third of your cow for two and a half of my chickens, how could we complete the transaction?

In the "money story" fairy tale, we spontaneously decided that we would use gold, for a bunch of nonsensical reasons that don't bear even cursory scrutiny. And so coin money sprang into existence, and we all merrily traded our gold with one another until a wicked government came and stole our gold with (cue scary voice) taaaaaaxes.

There is zero evidence for this. It's literally a fairy tale. There is a rich history of where money came from, and the answer, in short is, governments created it through taxes, and money doesn't exist without taxation:

https://locusmag.com/2022/09/cory-doctorow-moneylike/

The money story is a lie, and it's a consequential one. The belief that money arises spontaneously out of the needs of freely trading people who voluntarily accept an arbitrary token as a store of value, unit of account, and unit of exchange (coupled with a childish, reactionary aversion to taxation) inspired cryptocurrency, and with it, the scams that allowed unscrupulous huxters to steal billions from everyday people who trusted Matt Damon, Spike Lee and Larry David when they told them that cryptocurrency was a sure path to financial security:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/15/your-new-first-name/#that-dagger-tho

It turns out that private money, far from being a tool of liberation, is rather just a dismal tool for ripping off the unsuspecting, and that goes double for crypto, where complexity can be weaponized by swindlers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/13/the-byzantine-premium/

We don't hear nearly as much about crypto these days – many of the pump-and-dump set have moved on to pitching AI stock – but there's still billions tied up in the scam, and new shitcoins are still being minted at speed. The FBI actually created a sting operation to expose the dirtiness of the crypto "ecosystem":

https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/10/24267098/fbi-coin-crypto-token-nexgenai-sec-doj-fraud-investigation

They found that the exchanges, "market makers" and other seemingly rock-ribbed institutions where suckers are enticed to buy, sell, track and price cryptos are classic Big Store cons:

http://www.amyreading.com/the-9-stages-of-the-big-con.html

When you, the unsuspecting retail investor, enter one of these mirror-palaces, you are the only audience member in a play that everyone else is in on. Those vigorous trades that see the shitcoin you're being hustled with skyrocketing in value? They're "wash trades," where insiders buy and sell the same asset to one another, without real money ever changing hands, just to create the appearance of a rapidly appreciating asset that you had best get in on before you are priced out of the market.

This scam is as old as con games themselves and, as with other scams- S&Ls, Enron, subprime – the con artists have parlayed their winnings into social respectability and are now flushing them into the political system, to punish lawmakers who threaten their ability to rip off you and your neighbors. A massive, terrifying investigative story in The New Yorker shows how crypto billionaires stole the Democratic nomination from Katie Porter, one of the most effective anti-scam lawmakers in recent history:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/14/silicon-valley-the-new-lobbying-monster

Big Tech – like every corrupt cartel in history – is desperate to conjure a kleptocracy into existence, whose officials they can corrupt in order to keep the machine going until they've maximized their gains and achieved escape velocity from consequences.

No surprise, then, that tech companies have adopted the same spin tactics that sowed doubt about the tobacco-cancer link, in order to keep the US from updating its anemic privacy laws. The last time Congress gave us a new consumer privacy law was 1988, when they banned video store clerks from disclosing our VHS rental history to newspapers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act

By preventing confining privacy law to the VCR era, Big Tech has been able to plunder our data with impunity – aided by cops and spies who love the fact that there's a source of cheap, off-the-books, warrantless surveillance data that would be illegal for them to collect.

Writing for Tech Policy Press, the Norcal ACLU's Jake Snow connects the tobacco industry fight over "pre-emption" to the modern fight over privacy laws:

https://www.techpolicy.press/big-tech-is-trying-to-burn-privacy-to-the-ground-and-theyre-using-big-tobaccos-strategy-to-do-it/

In the 1990s, Big Tobacco went to war against state anti-smoking laws, arguing that the federal government had the right – nay, the duty – to create a "harmonized" national system of smoking laws that would preempt state laws. Strangely, politicians who love "states' rights" when it comes to banning abortion, tax-base erosion and "right to work" anti-union laws suddenly discovered federal religion when their campaign donors from the Cancer-Industrial Complex decided that states shouldn't use those rights to limit smoking.

This is exactly the tack that Big Tech has taken on privacy, arguing that any update to federal privacy law should abolish muscular state-level laws, like Illinois's best-in-class biometric privacy rules, or California's CPPA.

Like Big Tobacco, Big Tech has "funded front groups, hired an armada of lobbyists, donated millions to campaigns, and opened a firehose of lobbying money," with the goal of replacing "real privacy laws with fake industry alternatives as ineffective as non-smoking sections."

Whether it's understanding the origin of money or the Big Tobacco playbook, knowing history can protect you from all kinds of predatory behavior. But history isn't merely a sword and shield, it's also just a delight. Internet pioneer Ethan Zuckerman is road-tripping around America, and in August, he got to Columbus, IN, home to some of the country's most beautiful and important architectural treasures:

https://ethanzuckerman.com/2024/08/29/road-trip-the-company-town-and-the-corn-fields/

The buildings – clustered in within a few, walkable blocks – are the legacy of the diesel engine manufacturing titan Cummins, whose postwar president J Irwin Miller used the company's wartime profits to commission a string of gorgeous structures from starchitects like the Saarinens, IM Pei, Kevin Roche, Richard Meier, Harry Weese, César Pelli, Gunnar Birkerts, and Skidmore. I had no idea about any of this, and now I want to visit Columbus!

I'm planning a book tour right now (for my next novel, Picks and Shovels, which is out in February) and there's a little wiggle-room in the midwestern part of the tour. There's a possibility that I'll end up in the vicinity, and if that happens, I'm definitely gonna find time for a little detour!

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

[ericaportfolio]

Disney's The Gremlins Over the Years

Chapter 1: Gremlins (Part 2)

This is Part 2 to Chapter 1. If you want to read Part 1 first, it's in the link below.

Due to the recent events with Epic Mickey Rebrushed, I thought of making a series of posts dedicated to Disney's infamous characters from the canceled WWII movie The Gremlins. The character designs of these guys have changed many times during the concept art process and over the years. Today, this is a collection of male Gremlin designs. The female Gremlins were called the Fifinellas, which I will get to them in the next post. For those discovering this, in summary, Disney was making WWII movies and shorts for the war effort. They were going to adapt Roald Dahl's first book about these guys, and several things like people getting tired of war movies and figuring out how to make the movie, which was canceled. I'm making these posts for fun and to help give artists ideas for their OCs and fanart. I would post some sample pictures and a minor breakdown in each post. I might miss some because there is so much, so this is just a handful of pictures and photos I collected over the years. We really need to make a Disney Gremlin's Wiki.

Anyways, let's jump into THE FUTURE!

Canceled Live Action/Animated Project (1992): Jumping forward into the future, Jerry Rees, director of The Brave Little Toaster, and Steve Leiva were trying to make a feature based on the original story with live action with animated gremlins like Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The illustrators for the project were Steve Moore and Frans Vischer. Again, GLAD they didn't we didn't get this style of the characters since they're far from the original designs. Here are two samples by Steve Moore.

Return of the Gremlins (2008): When Disney made those terrible DVD sequels, Dark Horse and Disney made a deal to reprint the original book, make merchandise, and release a three-part comic sequel in 2008. The first cartoonist was Dean Yeagle, but he could not finish, so DreamWorks artist Fabio Laguna came in to do the final issue. In this story, Old Pilot Gus's grandson, Young Gus, goes to Old Gus's home in Brittan to handle the property sale. But SURPRISE! It's inhabited by the Gremlins that Old Gus befriended during WWII. Chaos ensues...

Epic Mickey (2010): Now, the moment you've all been waiting for, the game that introduced most of us to Disney’s Gremlins. Here are the variants we remember split into two groups: 3D Gameplay and 2D Cutscenes. Going forward, some of these pictures are from the Epic Mickey Wiki.

3D Gameplay

2D Cutscenes

Epic Mickey Comic (2010): In the 64 page-long graphic novel, the only Gremlin character who appeared in the comic was Gremlin Gus.

Epic Mickey (2012): In the sequel, we get more variants of the Gremlins and a Gremlin Prescott redesign.

3D Gameplay

2D Cutscenes

Epic Mickey Comic (2012): Gremlin Gus was joined by Gremlin Prescott and Gremlin Jamface.

Donald Duck #18 Comic (2015 IDW): This is the crossover we have wanted since the Comic Cover. In a translated European Swedish comic of 'Rue Brittania!', Donald and Fethry get a new assignment: travel back in time to WWII and face the Gremlins to de-gremlin the airfield. Artists: Pencils and Ink by Flemming Andersen and Colors by Digikore Studios.

There's a lot more I could add, but we would be here all day. If this post gets popular enough, I will do more on the side before the game comes out. If there are changes to the Gremlins in the Reboot, I'll make a Part 3. Hope this post is a helpful source for old and new Gremlin and Epic Mickey fans alike!