#the waiting world

[never-quite-buried]

Nope now it’s at the point that i’m shocked that people off tt don’t know what’s going down. I have no reach but i’ll sum it up anyway.

SCOTUS is hearing on the constitutionality of the ban as tiktok and creators are arguing that it is a violation of our first amendment rights to free speech, freedom of the press and freedom to assemble.

SCOTUS: tiktok bad, big security concern because china bad!

Tiktok lawyers: if china is such a concern why are you singling us out? Why not SHEIN or temu which collect far more information and are less transparent with their users?

SCOTUS (out loud): well you see we don’t like how users are communicating with each other, it’s making them more anti-american and china could disseminate pro china propaganda (get it? They literally said they do not like how we Speak or how we Assemble. Independent journalists reach their audience on tt meaning they have Press they want to suppress)

Tiktok users: this is fucking bullshit i don’t want to lose this community what should we do? We don’t want to go to meta or x because they both lobbied congress to ban tiktok (free market capitalism amirite? Paying off your local congressmen to suppress the competition is totally what the free market is about) but nothing else is like TikTok

A few users: what about xiaohongshu? It’s the Chinese version of tiktok (not quite, douyin is the chinese tiktok but it’s primarily for younger users so xiaohongshu was chosen)

16 hours later:

Tiktok as a community has chosen to collectively migrate TO a chinese owned app that is purely in Chinese out of utter spite and contempt for meta/x and the gov that is backing them.

My fyp is a mix of “i would rather mail memes to my friends than ever return to instagram reels” and “i will xerox my data to xi jinping myself i do not care i share my ss# with 5 other people anyway” and “im just getting ready for my day with my chinese made coffee maker and my Chinese made blowdryer and my chinese made clothing and listening to a podcast on my chinese made phone and get in my car running on chinese manufactured microchips but logging into a chinese social media? Too much for our gov!” etc.

So the government was scared that tiktok was creating a sense of class consciousness and tried to kill it but by doing so they sent us all to xiaohongshu. And now? Oh it’s adorable seeing this gov-manufactured divide be crossed in such a way.

This is adorable and so not what they were expecting. Im sure they were expecting a reluctant return to reels and shorts to fill the void but tiktokers said fuck that, we will forge connections across the world. Who you tell me is my enemy i will make my friend. That’s pretty damn cool.

[bookwyrminspiration]

god I would be UNSTOPPABLE if I was capable of consistently initiating tasks. just you wait. you'll be waiting a while but just you wait

[boct-kimerakal]

notes notes notes!

think think think - then don’t!

scattered notes / half thoughts / to-dos. there was more i’ll ponder it later on. later on, at some point. somewhen.

abyasa does not ever deal with The Thing and i find it so funny. oh to give her a problem that she makes, in her mind, into one of the greatest battles of her life - and for her to just literally never deal with it, until the day she dies. is so funny to me. she’s just like oh let’s just ignore the writhing all-consuming heron in the back of my mind. thanks okay bye. oh hummingbird is definitely concerned about it and aware of it. sorry my beautiful heron you have to deal with THE CRISIS THAT IS BEING A MIND IN FLESH!

i just think aly going through the horrors of corporate espionage with two teenagers and some dude is really funny. especially considering the fact aly probably hates corporations and actually most organised institutions but in a very “this is so over-complicated way!” oh my god would aly be an anarchist if they knew what that was? they genuinely don’t think much ever so it’d be a very loose and surface-level understanding of the concept though.

akan-inra, ezya-niru, the bog bodies by rabbitology. that’s the thought.

okay i’ve been thinking (in the artsy abstract terrible way i do) about science communication and education lately and i am. staring directly at my ocs! staring directly at my ocs! in a way that makes me so unwell! shifters-wise, i am so entertaining giving telajan an education-oriented social media account and then making it plot-relevant. for the waiting world (because i am all over the place, presently. what’s it like to have your mind jumping back and forth like a haywire elevator through a skyscraper! well, this...), it’s. oh. trick and education privilege is something i think of a lot. which by the way! exists in contrast to hawk and how hawk was educated (very oversimplified but. communal, accessible but lacking in expertise) and that makes me ponder all the so-very-many different educational systems in TWW. oh my god. falls to my knees. knowledge. why am i stupid. this could be so fun to describe.

i’ve actually betrayed myself and continued to think about trickhawkrex (harbinger) and i hate to say it, but i’m either still extremely secretly (as in - stressor unknown to me) stressed OR i actually like thinking about them. or both! anyways. trick had top surgery for a flat chest because she’s cool like that, rex has a girlfriend who actually hangs out with them sometimes and hawks lost her tooth when she met trick & rex and still refuses to get it replaced, just to because she thinks the gap is cool.

i think it’d be Uber Funny if harbinger hawk killed a sphinx and i can’t really explain this one. bye.

SURAKSHA EP BY PINKSHIFT. MIGHT ALSO TO BE BLAME FOR THE MENTAL ILLNESS. their friendship is so profound and devoted (even if they totally suck at the start) and it makes me sob on floor crying. the songs from the EP can totally be applied to self-identity versus their surrounding society + upbringing in it versus cultural heritage. probably. i’ll word this in a clever way when i’m not pointing at them all and screaming INHERITED GUILT. me when i stare at this three and wonder to each what the word home means. oh, trick would be all careful and deliberate and artful about it, i love their kaleidoscopic heart. rex would feel torn in two and feel a grief.. most definitely. and hawk just wouldn’t know! btw. head in hands. to me by pinkshift is so trickhawkrex dynamic! their acceptance of each other and each other’s terrible self-complication. i reckon hawk might never have been able to forge such a strong bond with them if hawk hadn’t first totally ignored them because - if hawk had actually liked the two idiots - they’d probably have been insufferably faux with them. so oh! they’re all just incorrigible - i hate them!

quick interlude (lies) for the obnoxious parallels between fishtragedy and heronhum. which i may expand in later.. they’re divided into strictly static roles - aly, the sworn defender, lover, the follower. & sonya, the over-achiever, the loved, the leader. whereas on the other hand, for the heron and the hummingbird, they’re all that to each other? there is a freedom and a fluidity which they are afforded, that aly and sonya could never have. labels are not boxes for heronhum, but temporary descriptors, waxing and waning with time and context. but circumstances (and their own biases, this need to cling to the narrative) force aly and sonya to find their selves in clear definition. there is no room for fluidity, they don’t have the necessary time/space/resources to develop that (!!!) also needed to metion: both sonya and abyasa struggle with accepting their own humanity. both sonya and abyasa have this wariness of money. sonya clawing herself up from poverty and abyasa having it all from the start... they’re so polarising when put side by side, that the similarities they have are sooo GRNRGHR to me. they)re my false equivalence duo, who never actually interact closely within the plot but look. in a weird thematic way they do. is this too much? might retcon this.

i can’t believe there is more (there is always more) but i’ve been thinking in nebulae lately and modern religions in the waiting world and. there’s something here. an upheaval. more TBA. probably. at some point. LOOK! THESE ARE NOTES! SHUT UP! BYE! TECHNOLOGICAL AND EDUCATIONAL ADVANCEMENT AND RELIGION ARE COOL TO WATCH AS COMPLICATE EACH OTHER AND THE THINGS BUILT AROUND/WITH THEM.

chin in hand. staring straight ahead. maybe work out the dangsahana coastal language and ethnic groups a bit more. i should probably think more on social hierarchies in kodyssi though because the merchant upper class was something i like developed in a hazy dream state once... then forgot. but something about?

instead of working on the harbinger AU maybe i should fall back into working on the end of times.. i quite liked it. even if only three characters were actually developed and not cardboard. and also

finding a way to incorporate a supernova remnant into one of my five million lore worlds is hitting again. save me save me space sciences i know nothing about save me.

I SHOULD BE THINKING ABOUT WAITING WORLD BG STUFF. I REALLY JUST! KEEP PROCRASTINATING. OH MY GOD. REMINDER TO SELF. maybe do something fun like mineral deposits and segue into culturally/economically relevant jewellery or exports. or for whatever reason the functionality of storm and flood protections because yay! urban planning! on dangsahana since i’ve been too lazy to flesh out other regions besides vague handwavey maybe-retconned-soon-facts.

ART! HISTORY! TRICKHAWK! THERE WAS A THOUGHT! IT DIED! BYE!

old copy paste so i don’t lose it: but! mostly just rough concepts surrounding her youth and the socioeconomic class she grew up in and what she would be exposed to in terms of non-inherited culture. sooo environment outside her family, the type of friends she had? i’m also thinking about sonya in contrast. ah i really want to make sonya contrast her in an art and culture sense but sonya’s whole thing is her dead-centre steadfast obsession with academic greatness (instead of economic, because she scorns wealth and doesn’t believe in the feasibility of perfect meritocracy) making her disconnected from artistic cultures (inherited art + popular media art) etc. in a “waste of time” way. in her eyes expression will never equate to change? which means ABYASA has to have the art root but i. don’t know. i mean heron would have been exposed to a lot of literature and time to think but her entire thing is feeling culturally askew (isn’t sure what cultures make her up/what she identifies or agrees with) all the time and then ignoring the conversation completely. but the reason why i really want to include it is! views on art culture and it’s relationship with ideological sentiments in different socioeconomic classes with different relationships to the government and the different notions that are entertained within them.. but ALSO sonya and abyasa are from entire different countries. narrowing it down to regions that i can’t even begin to compare. but there’s no NEED for them to be perfect environmentally-controlled narrative comparisons SO LIKE WHY AM I BOTHERING WORRYING!! and like oh there’s a fascinating case study of punk culture in aceh and ohhh. cultural integration. and i want to put that into shifters somehow. but it doesn’t make any sense because even though shifters takes place in the future, it is based on Real World Things!! which means i have to look at the waiting world but looking at the waiting world requires me to make up but the borrowed concept and it’s history and how/why it was integrated into the new environment

i haaate all my thoughts, they’re like little half-ideas that plague me and taunt me because there are so many! and they dance around in little circles! and i have naught the dogged resilience nor the ability to retain information to pursue them in any greater way. anyways! i could be doing something useful with my free time but instead i fill it with little fictional characters .. how i ache for competence

[guiiay]

yeah... yeah

[ohposhers]

GIVE THESE BOYS A WEEKEND YAOI FISHING TRIP !! GAT DAMN!! i actually have so many thoughts about Big getting Shadow into fishing istg im gonna make a whole comic on it im in too deep

[keferon]

Snow bots au anyone? :D

They're back together a year later because it's snowing again❄️

All right! For context: I imagine them hanging out every winter in some kind of resort (a resort that Blurr owns. Because his bar business has expanded that much over time.)

[hootyhoowoo]

In da clerb, we all fam

[mafuyuakgae]

even if I came to love humanity in the end, there’s no proof I was ever here, right?

[kinerxy]

(evil) unicorn redesign

its still a wip cuz i'm still figuring out how to design the part that unifies the tusk and the mouth so i guess ill have to study some references, the head is based on the skull of a Tetralophodon with a bit of artistic modification specially on the second head (right) where the tusks curve upwards to imitate the appareance of the horn of a conventional unicorn, the first one (left) is my favorite tho

here's the concept of a heraldry that i will put on the armor of a faction i'm designing that is part of my world building project, its still a simple sketch but i really liked what i did for the tusk and mouth cuz it lowkey looks like its grinning its teeth which is cool.

now im also having another debate with their name since i originally called them molar horses despite not having any feature related to teeth but now i think the name fits them more since they don't have horns but tusks instead. but i'm still undecided cuz well, their notable feature is the big ass incisives, not the molars. so do I call them incisive horses now? silly. so i guess ill try to find a different name or idunno. enough yapping for today

[akanemnon]

Wow, not even 5 seconds in and they're already starting a fight.

FIRST - PREVIOUS - NEXT

MASTERPOST (for the full series / FAQ / reference sheets)

[iamwizzzzz]

come visit me in my dreams tonight i miss you

[niko-ur-local-moron]

I feel like we all have moved on from this scene way too soon

[botanicallyinclinednerd]

Polites died believing that the world is kind, and yet his death contributes to Odysseus deciding to become a monster. Absolutely devastating

[boct-kimerakal]

boctlore directory

a good old world masterpost

everything you need to know (well, the basics at least) of my lore worlds that i’ll post about on here, at some point. mostly for archival’s sake.. future boct this goes out to you <3 you wanted me to “get more organised” so here it is.

i SWEAR you’ll find at least one goofy. (hopefully?) let’s just say i’m diverse. there’s more TBA, i’m just the cosmos’ laziest creature.

non-inclusive of my not-original stuff, maybe i’ll make a separate post for that one (looking at you, pondwater from hit indie horror survival game signalis) but here it is gang! 🤍 an ode to all the girlies who talk & think too much.. MY APOLOGIES FOR THE SHEER MUNDANITY OF MY MIND...

The Waiting World - think: neon signs and city streets, think ruins in the forest, think graffiti, think clashing architecture, tension between peoples, think of questions like “what’s yours? what’s mine?” and the indomitable nature of, well, the natural world. the waiting world is a fantasy world focused on an archipelago nation (anjikhani-olahra) - 39 years independent after 171 years under the palms of a number conquering ghonsunwa (earthly realm) nations - as it experiences rapid advancement, a globalising world and unbalanced world power dynamics. a world between worlds (ghosunwa/underworld/knockoff-earth & ghonshogwa/aboveworld) inhabited by some pretty neat-lookin’ guys with horns and tails.

despite all it’s culture, it’s inter-ethnic quarrels, it’s own grand moral debates, it’s fight against pervasiveness of less sanitary aspects of its cultures (invasive, native, a mix of both), it’s fight to preserve identity at all, as well as over what it is achieve modernity - the waiting world is reduced in the eyes of both the other realms to the middleman, a hotspot for smuggling and crime. and stories follow characters as they exist in the context of all of that, pulling at the threads of the world around them. a world, waiting for them to unravel it!

my main guys from this world are trick and hawkes from the [Kau Bakari] plotline and trust me. i can yap about them forever. it was so hard not to

Shifters - an alternate earth where, in 1967, these undefinable entities (basically representing major classes under chordata... categories scare me) called emissaries rolled up! they warned of a ‘storm’ of dead fragments of emissaries. they also offered people the ability to make pledges, adopting the traits of one specific animal species - as shapeshifters. but they’ve always existed, and offered shifting far more selectively before, long ago. why suddenly give more away? was that a reparation for the storm? why are they here? why show themselves now? and the storm? what does this mean?

it’s a world with multiple stories, some intersecting, most others not. my current babygirl storylines are

[Paper Kites] about a jet-setting CEO and her archeologist fiancé, on their way to finding out big secrets about the emissaries. i’m very abnormal about them, i will actually pay you to listen to me talk about them. they’re in aroace love by the way did i mention that.

[Pick-up Sticks] a look into the effects of that CEO and archeologist’s curiosity - oh-so-far-away, the little people hit by a corporate conspiracy, political upheaval and never-before seen shifter tensions

Trip2Temasek - it’s just a silly thing - framed like a classic TTRPG campaign! but with fun flavour. a Singaporean twist, to be exact. six silly pinnacles of Singaporean character tropes. a bird-having, plant-raising void deck uncle (the druid) + an overworked tiger mom (the barbarian) + a deviant 16-year-old ah lian (the rouge) + the perfect prefect from the top school just over (the wizard) + the over-eager community club lady (the cleric) and, of course, the community cat (the bard) - who all get flung into a thriving, ancient forest-city mirroring singapore, inhabited by spirits, young gods and beastly creatures.

i dance around a little with casual racism, materialism, individualism/collectivism, the price of progress and maybe a little bit of the guilt of being privileged. not-so-uniquely Singaporean experiences. if i post about it, it’ll probably be cute moments between the characters or full-on breakdowns about my disconnection from my national identity! yippee!

Hysteria! Starforged - it’s a big mess of a sci-fi world about an inter-planetary war - with too many criss-crossing motivations. the point is no one is really sure what’s happening, it’s just a lot of a lot. there’s two big “sides,” but unfortunately no good guys. one’s the legion. it absorbs, it’s one goal being uniformity in morality across the stars to prevent... warfare (irony!) - life is a lot more complicated than that though, so they wind up just making things worse - they (attempt) to install their law and cultures in every planet they absorb.

the other is called the council, an allegiance formed to oppose the domination of the legion. they suck too! in their desperation to get an upper hand and escape the reign of the legion, they exploit lesser-equipped planets and their own allies. they have enlisted entire planets without spacefaring ability into their intergalactic war, just to have numbers. almost none of the other planets have planetary governments so a lot of “tinier” international wars happen. do you see where this is going. hysteria. hysteria starforged, even.

and my main trio are just a little gang. three girls against the world, (two soldiers pulled from one war to another and a dignitary from a country that no longer exists!) and god, there’s a lot of World.

The Ending That Wasn’t (to be renamed..) - another sci-if one, but i got silly with it. silly and goofy even. six idiots wake up on the brig of a half-destroyed ship floating around space, with absolutely NO memory AT ALL! space-styles, “i’m too dumb for rules” D&D - if it played by one lonely geek.

space ikea, quantum toasters, a robot t-rex that the sci-fi goblin is SWEARING to you is a house pet on another planet. my colourful cast of stupid idiots saved the world once - in fact, literally JUST BEFORE they woke up. they just don’t remember it. they barely remember anything - and as they, through typical D&D party shenanigans, make petty criminals out of themselves, they realise that maybe they were pretty big deals, actually. matured, world-saving heroes that you are by the end of the campaign, even. starting from scratch is a little awkward.

they’ll figure it out, eventually.

Of Obsolete Orisons - post-apocalyptic, in a lovely, overgrown, “we’re rebuilding” way. - avatars of natural forces walk the earth when they fancy, most worshipped as gods. wardens of equilibrium represented the pillars of balance until, well, they suddenly couldn’t - and then the apocalypse came.

30 years afterwards, an avatar who thought it’d be fun to just be a guy separates themselves from divinity, gets into silly shenanigans as it discovers the world before it. the least interesting of my many, many lore worlds. i poke a little bit at the personification of the world around us in the form of divine consciousnesses, as well as perfection and pre-determinism, nothing fancy, i’m just amused and intrgued.

MORE TBA - eventually lawl ... here are projects i’ve yet to describe but want to: AoWSLaA, Curiosity!, [Liar]bird, Cloudscape!, Science Fiction, The Great Divide and maaaybe Mayhem & Magic.

notably! there’s also the tag boct thoughts, which will feature largely privated posts consisting of delirious rumination on this story-making hobby of mine. i am a wicked songstress howling lyrics in states of incomprehension and some of the time i sing for my ears alone!

[quixoticprince]

When your medic leaves to go pocket another man or something

[brainfreeze27]

i'll take it to mine

image id below

[photo ID: a digital redraw of take this to your grave by fall out boy's album cover. from left to right, pete wentz, andy hurley, patrick stump, and joe trohman sitting on a fold up bed (?). the image is a monochrome teal with a lighter blue border around the boys, and grafitti on a brick wall behind them reading "TAKE THIS TO YOUR GRAVE" and "tell that mick he just made-", with normal text above it reading "FALL OUT BOY". end id]