#there is some overlap between the three categories

[future-crab]

Not to beat a dead horse, but the naming conventions in the Magnus Archives are truly delightful. Jonny really said, “Here’s a cast of fascinating characters! Their names are:

My actual full legal name

The first names of my friends + the last names of famous horror writers

Michael (x4)

They all die horrible deaths :)”

[dykeiism]

why are radfems against sex work?

i'd like to make a post to summarize my views on pornography, prositution, and other forms of sex work. it will be useful for me to have it all in one place, and i'll continue to update it as i learn more about the topic. i've broken down my arguments into three categories: demand, consent, and intimacy. there's a lot of overlap between the categories, but i still find it helpful to have it organized in this manner. ↶ೃ✧˚demand. ❃ ↷ ˊ- sex work creates a demand that will be fulfilled with sex trafficking.

let's imagine the best-case scenario: a woman doing sex work because she wants to. she genuinely enjoys this type of work, and her clients treat her well. this is understood by some to be "ethical sex work."

as a business, sex work must actively encourage the demand for sex work to keep increasing. porn industries want to create porn addicts. they want to create a pornsick society. that’s how businesses survive. it's horribly optimistic to imagine that every person who wants to use pornography or prostitutes will do so ethically (assuming that ethical sex work is possible). but let's imagine for a moment that ethical sex work exists, and that everyone who wants to consume sex work does so ethically. would there ever be enough women who are willingly going into sex work to satisfy this demand? as long as there is a demand, there will be sex trafficking to meet that demand. the “ethical” sex worker is a very very small minority of sex workers who throws every other sex worker and prostituted woman/girl under the bus for her own gain.

sex workers need men to use porn and prostitutes, and they will encourage men to do so. is this good for feminism? do you think these are good men? do you think these men respect the women in their lives? do they have healthy sexual relationships, or are they sexually reliant on static fantasies created by strangers who they have no personal connection or intimacy with?

↶ೃ✧˚consent. ❃ ↷ ˊ- consent can't be bought. consent can’t be bought--in fact, the mainstream conception of "consent" isn't one that respects women's sexual desires. it's a copout that allows men to do whatever they want to women, as long as the woman agrees to having it done to her. sex is something you do with someone, not to them. so many women (including myself) have uncritically consented to sexual activities in the heat of the moment because our minds were clouded by confusion, surprise, or anxiety, and we didn't feel like we could take a moment to think things through. think of it from the perspective of someone who uses a prostitute, in the best case scenario (in which the woman is pursuing prostitution of her own volition and not out of necessity): you found a woman who you're sexually interested in, but she isn't interested in you. instead of offering her a worthwhile sexual experience, you use your money to blow past her disinterest and buy her consent. you then begin to touch and penetrate a woman who wouldn't be interested in you if not for the money you offered her. you see no problem with this. since you are paying this woman, she is providing you a service. you have a one-sided sexual encounter where you use someone else's body to fulfill your own desires. think about the men who do this, and the men who consume pornography. how do you think they view sexuality? how do you think they treat their own sexual partners, after consuming so many static sexual fantasies that are devoid of any personal intimacy? ↶*ೃ✧˚intimacy. ❃ ↷ ˊ- i've decided to put "intimacy" at the end, because it is the most subjective of the three. upon reading this, it may become quite clear that these views are influenced by my personal experiences with sex work, sexual trauma, and christianity.

if you’re sex positive, you’ll be against porn. porn misrepresents sexuality by completely divorcing sexual pleasure from love, intimacy, and vulnerability. witnessing such intimate imagery of total strangers will inevitably mess up the way you approach your own sexuality, and the way you interact with sexual partners. porn puts a price on sexuality and makes it into something that can be bought and sold.  porn consumption encourages hookup culture

[foolishlyzephyrus]

———

This was a very silly goofy post I enjoyed but it also sparked genuine curiosity: how accurate is this? I’m a data hound, so I did some fact checking. Please be aware I am by no means an expert and this was simply a result of some cursory investigating and inputting stuff into a calculator.

For RTD, I took it to mean any episode title that was singular. Only eight out of the sixty episodes of RTD’s run have one word titles, with six having two syllables (Dalek, Doomsday, Gridlock, 42, Utopia, and Midnight) and the other two being monosyllabic (Rose and Blink). That’s roughly 13% of his episodes. Definitely a trend but he was actually quite creative with his titles. Here’s some other fun statistical stuff: the most popular words in episode titles appear to be ‘dead’ (The Unquiet Dead, Forest of the Dead and Planet of The Dead), ‘planet’ (Impossible Planet, Planet of the Ood, Planet of the Dead) and ‘time’ (Last of the Time Lords, End of Time Part 1 and End of Time Part 2) occurring at about 5% each, with ‘earth’ and ‘doctor’ occurring twice each respectively.

For Moffat, I went a little more broad, considering any episode that used the naming convention ‘of’/‘of the’ or featured ‘doctor’ in any capacity. Out of the eighty-four episodes in his run, twenty six filled the criteria, that’s about 31%. Eighteen adhered to the ‘of’ requirement (Victory of the Daleks, The Time of Angels, The Vampires of Venice, Day of the Moon, Curse of the Black Spot, The Wedding of River Song, Asylum of the Daleks, The Power of Three, The Bells of Saint John, The Rings of Akhaten, Journey to the Center of the TARDIS, Robot of Sherwood, In the Forest of the Night, The Husbands of River Song, The Pyramid at the End of the World, The Lie of the Land, The Empress of Mars, and The Eaters of Light), four contained the word ‘doctor’ (Vincent and the Doctor, The Doctor’s Wife, The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe, and The Doctor Falls), and four fit into both categories (The Name of the Doctor, The Day of the Doctor, The Time of the Doctor and The Return of Doctor Mysterio; it’s funny once you realize that Name, Day and Time were all released sequentially). The claim is thereby substantiated, the man loves his ‘of’s’.

Chibnall’s criteria was difficult to discern but I decided on anything that contained the name of a Who monster classic or otherwise, was a part, or similarly used ‘of’/‘of the’. My findings were quite interesting as there was bunch of overlap between my selected categories. As a whole, out of the thirty-one episodes in Chibnall’s run, eighteen fit the criteria. That’s an overwhelming 58%, so it is most definitely correct assumption. In terms of part episodes, there were eight as there are two proper parted episodes (Spyfall, Part 1 and Spyfall, Part 2) and the serialized six-episode Flux series. Thirteen episodes contain ‘of’/‘of the’ with six exclusively using ‘of’/‘of the’ (The Demons of the Punjab, The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos, Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror, The Haunting of Villa Diodati, Chapter Five: Survivors of the Flux, Power of The Doctor). This is where it gets interesting, as the remaining seven episodes containing ‘of’ are all the Who monster episodes (Ascension of the Cybermen, Revolution of the Daleks, Fugitive of the Judoon, Chapter Two: War of the Sontarans, Chapter Four: Village of the Angels, Eve of the Daleks, Legend of the Sea Devils). It would appear that Chibnall is an equal fiend for ‘of’s’, especially considering the monsters. So, very on brand for classic who naming conventions as well.

To conclude, it was a largely factual silly goofy post (props to @fanonical) and I enjoyed my little data collection exercise.

[bloodpen-to-paper]

QSMP Awards 2024 Summarized

-The audio was scuffed for the first half. I don't mean a little crispy. I don't mean with a slight echo. It was fucked in every way imaginable. The audio sounded like it was going through a blender. Then it kept getting too loud, then too quiet (so much so we couldn't hear), all while being way too crispy. Charlie Slimecicle monologued to the audience while the team was trying to fix it but since the audio was both too crispy and too quiet we couldn't actually understand anything he was saying. This carried on for about 7 minutes with him holding two microphones, neither of which was working, before the stream crashed (again)

-All the staff are apparently Cucurucho, with one of them being a "main Cucurucho"

-Missa wore a "Quackity my beloved" shirt. I could not explain to you what the blazer over it was supposed to be.

-Everyone else at the ceremony was shown through discord call. I'm convinced Charlie has never seen German or Lenay's faces cause he did not know it was them until Quackity said their names

-The screen was supposed to switch between showing all the people on the discord and it kept switching between the same four people. If I have to hear Q, Charlie and Missa chant "Foolish" or "Pol" ever again-

-Mariana showed up and Charlie immediately went into bitter ex mode. He also hit on Mariana. Multiple times.

-We got a patented Ironmouse "coño" and chat lost their shit over Luzu existing, as expected

-Mariana looked like Michael Jackson, Bad's background could've been the set of Breaking Bad, Roier had a ski mask, lots of people learned what Lenay, German and Vegetta's looked like for the first time, and Mike had a kawaii filter

-Somehow Bad didn't even get nominated for Best Cucurucho Jumpscare, showing that even non-red carpet events can produce award snubs (congrats to Bagi!)

-Though I yearned for Maximus getting nominated for his Eh Vegetta prank, we all knew the win had to go to Vegetta for the mines

-The audio eventually became bearable but the echo never fully left. At some point there were like three or four overlaps of Vegetta giving his acceptance speech

-Acau won for Best Death from getting killed by an enderman (in my heart Foolish's accidental death by Pomme's sniper that got him eliminated from the elections won, but we did get Quackity dying to a fly as a nom so I feel complete. Also congrats to Acau!)

-The Qsmp shop is officially open! We got eggie merch :]

-Quackity forgot to roll clips for the Best Purgatory 2 Moment nominees and almost read out the winner before we got the montage (Wuant won! It was the clip of him being told he lost and he accidentally did a flip. They weren't able to get the acceptance speech on stream so we saw it from Quackity's phone)

-Funniest QSMP Moment nominees were all fucking hilarious, its hard to pick just one but Maxo winning for when he respawned after a lore-heavy moment in Pierre's bed to his own moans being remixed into a song absolutely deserved the win

-Saddest QSMP Moment was unnecessary and the admins will be hearing from my lawyers for making me relive Dapper's first lost life, Dia de los Muertos and the end of Purgatory 1 (Jaiden and Roier saying bye to Bobby won, Roier changed his screen to black and white and held up what looked like a mini Cucurucho being used as a cross)

-Best QSMP Original Song was played prematurely when the category was Best Language Exchange, and we got a spoiler for the winner (YD and Hugo's exchange won and YD's audio was muted so we just saw her Vtuber model getting excited)

-The aforementioned Best Qsmp Original Song had Gordinho Gostosinho looping aggressively over Charlie singing the Juanaflippa song, which I hope to god gets clipped cause it was hilarious (I'm glad the Roier and Cucurucho rap got nominated). Charlie was very confused why they had him announce his own win.

-Best PVP unsurprisingly went to Etoiles for his colosseum Code fight, after all he is the Best🔥 (the other noms were great too, we had Philza vs Tubbo in Purgatory, Bad and Maxo eliminating El Quackity from the elections, and a cute sparring session between Pac and Richas)

-Best Qsmp Fails went to Fit for that time Pac's internet cut out during their date (of course he bragged about his Brasilian boyfriend after learning he won for best loser)(also if it was up to me Quackity's fly deaths would've been added to this category just sayin')

-The audio problems were revealed to have been roleplay the entire time. Yep. All part of the lore.

-Speaking of, most of the winners who were in the discord call could not be heard so they had to give speeches through Quackity holding his phone up to the mic

-Best Roleplayer went to Roier for his Doied arc (the screen prematurely showed him before they could read the announcement, and his speech was him kissing the camera)

-Worst Server House went to Mariana accompanied with the classic clip of him reacting to the admins roasting his started base; Mariana was part of the discord call but left at some point so he couldn't give a speech, to which Charlie jumped on the opportunity to roast his absence like a shark smelling blood (they rightfully nominated Quackity for his clip of Acau reacting to his failure of a starter house, and apparently Carre's base is just his bed on a dirt plot)

-Most Iconic Clip went to Pac for stealing the Qsmp Logo (the other lovely noms included Foolish and co. accidentally closing their house door after a creeper came in an attempt to shut it out, and Tina reacting to a mob giving Felps a blowjob)

-The Most Bankrupt Islander went to Niki for being broke, we stan (during the nom montage we got a passa tudo mention)

-The Creator Who Spent the Most Time on the Server Award went to Bad, which was shocking to no one, although they did use his Barbie Girl clip for the nom montage (they also used Fit wearing a wig for his clip)

-The Qsmp cake for the one year anniversary had the text "FELICIDADES ALBERTO". We do not know who Alberto is. Pol was losing it.

-Tubbo won for The Creator With the Most Deaths (106), while The Creator With Fewest Deaths went to Philza (he only had 1!). Philza was able to be heard through stream but the hosts didn't know this so they would hear him from Quackity's phone and repeat what he was saying even though we could hear him

-Everytime the camera cut back to the hosts Charlie, Quackity and Missa had more cake on their faces

-Most Distance Traveled (in Minecraft) went to Etoiles (6,000+ km jfc)

-Creator With the Most Mob Kills went to Pierre (162,960 mob kills. what the fuck.)

-They accidentally read the award for Creator With the Most Damage Taken (Foolish) during the Best Builder announcement, confusing the shit out of everyone, especially cause the screen showed Mike instead of Foolish. I am still unclear who won Best Builder

-Creator With the Most Blocks Placed went to Mike!!! (MIKE WIN VAMBORAAAAAAAAAAA🇧🇷🇧🇷🇧🇷)

-We had to uncomfortably sit through Missa feeding Charlie cake (and just Charlie in general)

-There was an In Memorium segment of the passed eggs (Quackity shat on a grieiving Charlie for Flippa only lasting 11 days, but in Charlie's words, "to you it was 11 days; to her it was a lifetime"). Charlie commentated and had nothing to say about Trump because he didn't know jack shit about Trump (though he did make a wall joke which is exactly what Maxo would have wanted godbless🙏)

-The stream ended with the discord people saying goodbye, while Roier was holding up the mini Cucuruchos and didn't move the entire time. I know he wasn't frozen because he blinked.

-Maxo sent in his acceptance speech video last minute and Quackity hyped it up as a mysterious final entry but Charlie guessed it was Maxo and spoiled it on accident

-Speaking of, Maxo's entry was him walking around heaven looking for Trump </3

-Charlie gave a heartfelt speech about the people he met through the Qsmp, all while looking like ate out frosty the snowman <3. Missa simpy thanked Alberto (we still do not know who Alberto is)

-Tubbo wasn't present in the discord call because he thought him streaming meant he couldn't join. After the stream Quackity called and Tubbo realized he was allowed to join the whole time

-We ended on a montage of various moments, with a message of excitement looking forward to the next year!

And of course, here are the screenies I managed to nab of the hosts slowly deteriorating into cake

[melbatron5000]

Sleepy, hungry, drugged, lost

The record album covers from Maggie's shop have been confounding me for a couple months now. They are JAM PACKED with Clues.

A couple of them I think I have figured out. A couple of them I think are pointing us towards something, like a trail of breadcumbs frozen peas.

Some of them are just making me nuts.

There are repeating themes on the album covers, and I started sorting them into categories based on their themes. But let me tell you about the first theme I noticed right away. I call it the "sleepy, hungry, drugged, lost" theme.

Right off the bat, what the fuck?? Sleepy, hungry, drugged, lost. Who? What? When does any of this happen in the show? And why is it the biggest category of albums?

Let me show you:

Antoine Balynska: It's Been a Long Night. Song titles: I can't wait to take my shoes off/Slip into the bath/Read a good book/Have a watery nap/Grab my jammies/Curl up in bed/Press my head into the pillow/Fall asleep forever

Colors: Black, gray, pink, green. Crowley, shades of gray, God, Hell?

Theme: Sleepy.

Okay, great. Some weird song titles on an Amazon extra. Whatever. Except:

Hamid Moon: Sea Songs. Song titles: One day I started floating/Got lost in the waves/Didn't bring a paddle/Been here for three weeks/Can't see land/There's little hope left

Colors: Soft blue, tan, brown, burnt orange. Aziraphale, Aziraphale, Aziraphale, secret Crowley?

Theme: Lost

Okay, the first one involved being sleepy, the second, being lost. Where are you going, Mel? Stay with me.

Izabelle McLaughlin: Singing in My Sleep. No song titles.

Colors: Black, gray, neon pink. Crowley, shades of gray, Heavenly miracles?

Theme: Sleepy.

Wasn't someone singing in their sleep? We assume Gabriel, but no name is actually said, and I'm not so sure. Don't ask me who it is, I don't know yet, but I don't think it's Gabriel. So, a second album featuring sleepy. Big whoop, right?

Oslo Revival: Come on Over to Our Third Floor Apartment. Song titles: We're having a party/Just for you/Four in a bed/Have this drink/It doesn't taste weird/We'll take care of you/We love you/You're one of us now/Together forever.

Colors: Black, white, gray, red, yellow, green, blue, auburn, purple, pink. Crowley, Heaven, shades of gray, Crowley, Crowley, Hell, Aziraphale, Crowley, Hellish miracles, Heavenly miracles?

Theme: Drugged, lost?

What the sweet Frances MacDormand??? What kind of song titles are these? Someone came up with these, deliberately, and then they got put in the Amazon extras. Why??

And Mel, what have you put in my drink? Where are you taking me?

Onward:

Raga Koboj: Earth, Swallow Me Whole. Song titles: Why can't I just stay in bed?/Sighing loudly/No one's going to lunch/I'm hungry but I don't want to eat alone/I wonder what's on the menu today/Probably something mediocre/I'm tired/It's Friday/I wish it would end

Colors: Black, blue. Crowley, Aziraphale?

Theme: Sleepy, hungry

Again, what the heck is going on here? Although now we have some overlap between sleepy/hungry. Still, though, what does this have to do with Good Omens??

There's more:

Randa Ransom: I'm Lost and I Don't Speak the Language. Song titles: Lost in Tokyo/What's that shop selling?/Sex dolls (self-assembly)/Where's the bathroom?/This toilet is singing/More sex dolls/There's a cafe for cats/I want to go home/What's home in Japanese?/Take me anywhere, taxi man.

Colors: Green, purple, red, neon pink. Hell, hellish miracles, Crowley, God?

Theme: Lost.

So here's another album involving being lost. Not hungry or sleepy. I'm still super confused about what's going on here. You? Great, let's keep going.

Rat Keith: Look at This Mountain. Song titles: The Mountain I Climbed/Assorted Wailing Chants of Peril/I Ate Some Berries (Shouldn't Have Done That)/What Happens on the Mountain, Stays on the Mountain/I See it in My Dreams/Soiled Leaves and Soft Bark/Don't Touch the Mushrooms/Huddle for Warmth/My Map Blew Away/This is My Home Now/Finally Rescued

Colors: Black, burnt orange, blue, purple. Crowley, secret Crowley, Aziraphale, Hellish miracles?

Theme: Drugged, lost, hungry.

With me so far? Good, me neither. One more:

Rehan Yu: Neon Dreams 2.0. Song Titles: Late Night Madness/Last Orders/Stumbling/The Night Tube/Falling Asleep/Waking Up in Vauxhall/The Night Tube (remix)/Giving Up at Wood Gree/Walking Alone/I Dropped My Phone/Shitty Kebab/Restless Sleep in a Bush

Colors: Black, white, red, blue, purple, neon pink. Crowley, Heaven, Crowley, Aziraphale, Hellish miracles, Heavenly miracles?

Theme: Sleepy, hungry, drugged (drunk), lost. There's the whole thing connecting all the other threads.

Did I say "connecting??" What the hell could the connection here possibly be?

The only thing I can think of right now is my theory about the missing scenes -- that there should be scenes opposite The Resurrectionists scenes, but they're missing. It's the only spot I can think of where someone -- Crowley -- gets drugged. So given the missing scenes should be parallels, Crowley drugs someone? Fucking WHO??

Whoever it is they've got in the bookstore, who isn't "you know who" any longer and was singing in his sleep? In both those instances, we assume Crowley and Aziraphale are talking about Gabriel, but I don't think so.

Is it Jesus 2.0? Except I suspect Nina is Jesus 2.0. Is it fucking GOD?? I know God is voiced by a woman, but let's let go of genders for a moment and remember God is often thought of and described in Christian mythology as not really any one gender. And given the Izabelle McLaughlin album, black and pink, titled "Singing in My Sleep," I think it might indeed be God. Though how Crowley might have drugged Her, I have zero idea. Does it have something to do with the 25 Lazarii miracle? Still, how could even that potent a miracle fuck with GOD?? What about someone else? Could it be Adam? Why would they kidnap Adam and drug him? Is it someone else ENTIRELY??

I will add that while I have black interpreted as a Crowley color here, it also seems to represent hiding and secrets throughout the show. And there is more than one person in the show with a black outfit and a pink accent piece. I feel like God's floating around somewhere, more present than we think.

I've also got purple interpreted as Hellish miracles -- but Gabriel's eyes are purple, too. Are those two things different shades of purple? I'm not even sure. It's kind of hard to tell. So take my color interpretations with a hefty grain of salt.

And frankly, I could be dead ass wrong about ALL of this. I could be overlapping categories that I'm putting the albums into -- sleepy, hungry, drugged, lost; only Neon Dreams 2.0 fits all four. That inspired me to put all these albums in the same category, but it's possible they don't go together. Maybe the sleepy albums all go in one category, and the lost albums all go in another. I don't know for sure. Perhaps they spider out from Neon Dreams 2.0? I don't know what that would mean.

But I feel like I'm onto SOMETHING. I'm going to keep poking until I find out exactly what.

[uboat53]

Well, it's the Olympics in the age of trans panic and I'm sure you can guess what that means. With that in mind, a few thoughts about gender and sport.

Okay, let's talk about the specific event that touched this off, Italy's Angela Carini abandoned a boxing match with Algeria's Imane Khelif after only 46 seconds, citing Khelif's strength and power. Some of the less reputable people in politics and media then began to speculate that she had some gender advantage despite having passed a gender and drug test which would have discovered something.

Look, let's get this out of the way at the start, Imane Khelif is a woman. She was born a girl and matured into a woman. She lives in and competes for a country where gender transition is illegal and there's no indication to any reasonable person that she's anything other than a woman who is very good at boxing. Perhaps she has some genetics that help her but, let's face it, every single athlete capable of competing at the Olympic level does; no one complained that Michael Phelp's low production of lactic acid was an unfair advantage! The only reason that there's any "controversy" at all is that people have this ingrained idea that women should NOT be too good at boxing.

And, ultimately, that's the biggest problem with this whole gender panic. There are three (count 'em, three) transgender athletes in the Olympics this year, Canada's Quinn (soccer), New Zealand's Laurel Hubbard (weightlifting), and the US's Chelsea Wolfe (BMX Freestyle - Reserve). Every other athlete in the Olympics was born in their assigned gender and has been tested as such in order to compete.

So why are people panicking about trans athletes? Simple, because their ideas about gender do not match the reality. Not every woman is physically smaller and weaker than every man, not every man has a hulking physique, and there is no clear dividing line between the testosterone levels of women and men. There's also racism at work, African and Middle Eastern women tend to have facial features associated with masculinity in the west while Asian men tend to have facial features associated with femininity in the west making it easy for white audiences without exposure to minorities to assume the worst.

Ultimately, though, the problem is this idea of a sharp gender binary as if men and women were two clearly different species with no overlap between them. Let's say this as clearly as possible: there is no way to define "woman" in a way that excludes all trans women and includes all cisgender women. There is simply too much overlap between men and women; biologically speaking, mammals in general have very small gender differences compared to other groups of species such as insects or certain groups of fish (look up the differences between male and female spiders or anglerfish sometime, THAT'S a gender binary).

What that means is that, no matter how you try to define "woman" or "man", you will always end up with a category that includes some people who every reasonable person would consider to be the opposite.

So here's the question I think we all need to answer before we go any further: what is the purpose of separating sports by gender? Is it so that inferior female athletes can get medals that would be denied to them by superior male athletes? Is it to reinforce our cultural gender norms? Is it another way to divide the competition for fairness like weight classes in boxing?

I suspect that different people have different answers to that question and, until we settle on a universal answer, athletes (who, by the way, are pretty much all outside of the averages for their age and gender by definition) are going to continue to be caught in the crossfire of one of the worst arguments to dominate our society.

[aliveandfullofjoy]

95th Academy Awards: Oscars Trivia!

Another torturously long awards season is over! A24's highest-grossing film ever, Everything Everywhere All at Once, defied almost every piece of popular wisdom about the Academy Awards and easily cleared every hurdle in its path to a blowout, historic Best Picture win.

As you probably know, I'm a sucker for Oscar trivia, and this year has plenty of juicy nuggets to dig into. Let's get to it, starting with our newest Best Picture winner.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is the third film in Oscar history to win three of the four acting categories, after A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and Network (1976). All three films won Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress. Everything Everywhere All at Once is the only film of the three that managed to win Best Picture.

Michelle Yeoh is the first Malaysian actress, first Asian actress, and second woman of color to win Best Actress. This is only the thirteenth time that Best Actress and Best Picture have overlapped in the 95-year history of the Oscars. Yeoh's nomination made her the first Asian actress nominated for the award since 1935. The only other is Merle Oberon, who hid her Asian identity in life and passed as white.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is the first science-fiction film to win Best Picture.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is the first Best Picture winner with a woman of color (Michelle Yeoh) in the lead role.

Having opened in theaters in late March 2022 (the same weekend of the 94th Academy Awards), Everything Everywhere All at Once is the Best Picture winner with the earliest calendar release since The Silence of the Lambs, which opened Valentine's Day 1991.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is the third Best Picture winner with a majority non-white cast (after 2016's Moonlight and 2019's Parasite) and the first American film with a majority Asian cast.

Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (Everything Everywhere All at Once) are the third directing team to win Best Director, joining Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise (West Side Story, 1961) and Joel Coen and Ethan Coen (No Country for Old Men, 2007). Kwan is also the fourth Asian director (and first Asian-American) to win Best Director.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is the first movie in 95 years of Oscars history to win six(!) so-called "above the line" awards -- referring to Best Picture, Director, the four acting categories, and the two writing categories.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is the first film to sweep the four primary guild awards (Producers Guild, Directors Guild, Writers Guild, and Screen Actors Guild) since Argo (2012), and only the fifth overall.

Some crazy coincidences between Michelle Yeoh and her Best Actress presenter Halle Berry: in addition to currently being the only two women of color to win Best Actress, they are also both former Bond girls (Yeoh in Tomorrow Never Dies [1997], Berry in Die Another Day [2002], both with Pierce Brosnan). Additionally, both women are former contestants of the Miss World pageant: Berry represented the United States in 1986, while Yeoh represented Malaysia in 1983. Also, in a weird case of history rhyming, both Berry and Yeoh won over a previous Oscar-winner in a film directed by Todd Field (Sissy Spacek in In the Bedroom in 2001, Cate Blanchett in TÁR in 2022).

With four wins, All Quiet on the Western Front tied with Parasite (2019), Roma (2018), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), and Fanny and Alexander (1982) as the most-rewarded non-English language films in Oscars history.

This is also the second time that Cate Blanchett has won a Golden Globe, a BAFTA, and a Critics Choice Award for a performance, only to lose the Oscar to the lead of the Best Picture winner. The other time this happened was the year another comedy won seven Oscars: Shakespeare in Love. Blanchett, who was nominated for Elizabeth that year, lost to Gwyneth Paltrow.

TÁR brought Blanchett her eighth Oscar nomination, tying her as the fourth most-nominated actress in Oscar history. Only Bette Davis (10), Katharine Hepburn (12), and Meryl Streep (21) are ahead of her.

TÁR is only director Todd Field's third feature (after 2001's In the Bedroom and 2006's Little Children), but all three of his films have gotten Best Actress nominations for their leads.

Blanchett has also extended her record as the Oscar-nominated actress with the most appearances in films nominated for Best Picture. With TÁR, she has now appeared in 10 Best Picture nominees.

Tom Hanks (who turned in one of the weirdest performances ever caught on film in Elvis) also crossed the 10 Best Picture appearance threshold with this year's nominations. The only nominated actor with more Best Picture appearances is Jack Nicholson, who's been in 11.

This year's nominations saw a record-breaking number of Asian actors nominated: Yeoh in Best Actress, Ke Huy Quan (Everything Everywhere All at Once) in Best Supporting Actor, and Hong Chau (The Whale) and Stephanie Hsu (Everything Everywhere All at Once) in Best Supporting Actress. Yeoh and Quan won, marking the first time multiple Asian actors have won in a single ceremony.

Hong Chau (The Whale) is the first Oscar-nominated actor to be born in a refugee camp.

This year also saw a record number of Irish actors nominated in a single year, with five: Colin Farrell (The Banshees of Inisherin) and Paul Mescal (Aftersun) in Best Actor, Brendan Gleeson and Barry Keoghan (both from The Banshees of Inisherin) in Best Supporting Actor, and Kerry Condon (again, The Banshees of Inisherin) in Best Supporting Actress.

It was a banner year for Ireland in other categories, too, with nominations in Best Live Action Short (An Irish Goodbye, which won the award) and in Best International Feature (The Quiet Girl, the first Irish-language film ever nominated for an Oscar).

With his win in the Supporting Actor category, Quan became only the second Asian actor to win that award, joining the late Haing S. Ngor, who won for his debut performance in The Killing Fields (1984).

All five of the nominees for Best Actor -- Austin Butler (Elvis), Colin Farrell (The Banshees of Inisherin), Brendan Fraser (The Whale), Paul Mescal (Aftersun), and Bill Nighy (Living) -- were first-time nominees. This is the first time this has happened in this category since 1934(!!!).

It was a huge year for first-time nominees across all four acting categories: 16(!) of the 20 actors nominated were first-timers. This is the most ever in a single year. The only actors with previous nominations were Cate Blanchett, Angela Bassett, Judd Hirsch, and Michelle Williams.

Jamie Lee Curtis (Everything Everywhere All at Once) is the third person to be nominated for an Oscar after both of her parents were nominated as well: her father Tony Curtis was nominated for The Defiant Ones (1958), while her mother Janet Leigh was nominated for Psycho (1960). The other sets of nominated parents and children are Liza Minnelli (with parents Judy Garland and Vincente Minnelli) and Laura Dern (with parents Diane Ladd and Bruce Dern). Minnelli, Dern, and Curtis all won acting Oscars.

With his performance in The Whale, Brendan Fraser became the first person to win Best Actor for a film not nominated for Best Picture since Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart (2009).

This is also the first time since 2005 that all four acting winners were first-time nominees. Additionally, none of the four acting winners won in their category at the BAFTAs, which has never happened before.

With his Best Supporting Actor nomination, Judd Hirsch (The Fabelmans) broke the record for the longest gap between acting nominations: he was last nominated 42 years ago for Ordinary People (1980). The record previously belonged to Henry Fonda, who had a 41-year gap between nods.

In addition to being the first actor ever nominated for a performance in a Marvel movie, Angela Bassett (Black Panther: Wakanda Forever) also became the fourth Black actress to be nominated more than once. She joined Viola Davis, Whoopi Goldberg, and Octavia Spencer.

The Fabelmans is the first movie to win the Golden Globe for Best Picture - Drama to go home emptyhanded at the Oscars since The Turning Point (1977[!]). In fact, this is the first time ever that both Golden Globe Best Picture winners (The Fabelmans in Drama, The Banshees of Inisherin in Comedy) went home with zero Oscars.

2022 had some other similarities with 1977, too: this was the first year since 1977 that two films (Everything Everywhere All at Once and The Banshees of Inisherin in 2022, Julia and The Turning Point in 1977) got four individual acting nominations. Both years saw comedies win Best Picture and Best Actress (Annie Hall in 1977), and both years had a sci-fi blockbuster nominated in Best Picture (Star Wars and Avatar: The Way of Water).

Ana de Armas (Blonde) became the second actor nominated for playing Marilyn Monroe, which is more Oscars than Monroe herself was ever nominated for. She was nominated in Best Actress alongside Michelle Williams (The Fabelmans), the other actress nominated for playing the star (in 2011's My Week with Marilyn).

De Armas also became the fifth Latina nominated for Best Actress, joining Fernanda Montenegro, Salma Hayek, Catalina Sandino Moreno, and Yalitza Aparicio. She is also the second Cuban actor ever nominated, after Andy Garcia.

With her win for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, legendary costume designer Ruth Carter became the first Black woman to win two Oscars — ever.

Only Austin Butler and Ana de Armas were nominated for playing historical figures this year. Weirdly, both Elvis and Blonde feature actor Xavier Samuel in small roles. What does it mean?

At 34 minutes long, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse is the longest Best Animated Short winner ever.

In addition to being the first song from an Indian film to be nominated for and win the Oscar for Best Song, "Naatu Naatu" (RRR) is the fourth non-English language winner of that award, after "Never on Sunday" (1960, originally performed in Greek), "Al otro lado del río" (2004, in Spanish), and "Jai Ho" (2008, in Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi). "Naatu Naatu" is in Telugu.

It was the year of the sequel: between Avatar: The Way of Water and Top Gun: Maverick, this marked the first time multiple sequels were nominated in Best Picture in the same year. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery also received major nominations.

Avatar and Top Gun also marked the first time since 1982 that the two highest-grossing films of the year were both nominated for Best Picture.

[broomsticks]

What was the HP fandom on AO3 writing in 2022?

some stats diving, ship- and femslash-focused.

default filters used for everything unless indicated otherwise: language: english, no crossovers. only on AO3 (obviously)

hmm someday i'll do a yearly breakdown maybe.

for reference, there were ~324,676 total works in the HP tag updated in 2022 and before, so the top ship Drarry makes up 16% of HP works.

ships in this list but not the former: jegulus, dorlene, and regulus & sirius.

ships in the former list but not this one: snarry, sevmione, tomarry.

harry the character is tagged in 42.7% of all HP works.

the list of "fastest-growing HP character tags in 2022" was almost identical to this. sirius, remus, james, and lily went up one place, severus and ginny down by one, and ron dropped by two. no change in the top 3.

i'm thinking of doing one for HP ships but am unsure which ships to do. you can get a rough estimation from graph #2 though!

A closer look at just the 2022 ships:

filters used: english, no crossovers, works updated between 2022-01-01 and 2022-12-31.

color = ship type by canonical gender. outlined = canon ship

Background vs main pairing ships:

most commonly tagged ships, with the otp:true filter:

very pretty spread of (canon gender, not AO3 category) F/M & M/M ships here.

notable: there is not a single snape ship in the first list, and two snape ships in the second (sevmione at #4 !! and snarry at #8). grindeldore is the other new entry, and

romione, dorlene and regulus & sirius fell out of the top 10

this is probably a better view though:

a mix of all ships in either of the top two graphs (excluding the platonic ship regulus & sirius by definition of the otp:true filter), plus remadora.

open to more ship suggestions, but at some point i need to think about a size cutoff

anyway: some interesting strata here:

snarry+sevmione at the >60-70% mark. (do all snape ships show this trend? just crossgen snape ships? what about other crossgen ships? to be investigated)

grindeldore is an expected outlier due to the different canonical time period

marauders era tends to have more fics-with-multiple-tagged-ships. unexpected - there are so many more named lightning gen characters! lightning gen fandom more splintered/fragmented?

clustering of canon couples at the 15-20% mark, surprisingly consistent across marauders vs lightning gen

oooooo i could soapbox about this dorlene outlier for days. (tldr: if you want to write OFCxOFC that's all well and good, but writing OFCxOFC as what's quite clearly a background ship and a background ship alone? i think we can do better.)

Multi-shipping & ship overlap

marauders era is dominated by one main fanon pairing. no other “/” pairing with either of these two characters makes the top 10 list. in contrast, wrt lightning gen, Draco, Harry, and Hermione are all shipped with each other, with all three combinations making the top 10 list.

there is one pair of marauders era ships with ship overlap, though. which means stats! also included remadora as an additional comparison point since that's another big overlapping ship

jegulus AND jily are tagged in 675 works, out of 3944 works (17%) where all three of james, lily, and regulus are tagged.

meanwhile drarry + dramione: 80 works tagging both ships, out of 8128 works tagging all 3 characters, with an overlap of <1% fics tagging both ships. these two do not mix.

actually ykw this all was very funny

---

✨ FEMSLASH! ✨

filters used: english, no crossovers, works updated between 2022-01-01 and 2022-12-31, and category:F/F.

ok so that's a complete nonstarter 😂

tried two ways of filtering down to just femslash ships without losing too much else in the process:

1) excluding works tagged M/M, F/M, and Gen (leaving 2765 fics)

dashed outline = cross-gen ship. solid = marauders gen. everything else = lightning gen.

oh, interesting, people are writing genderbend wolfstar? *checks fics* -- no they're not. 'nuff said.

2) instead, tried adding the otp:true filter (2402 fics)

very similar results -- both lists had the same 9 femslash ships. Bellamione (#1 on both), Fleurmione (#2), Pansmione (#3/#4), Dorlene (#3/#5), Linny (#4/#6), Cissamione (#5/#6), Ginmione (#7/#9), Marylily (#7/#9), Ginsy (#8/#10).

i don't see any obvious trends re. which ships are ranked higher on one list vs the other.

a real quick rating comparison between categories, using the otp:true filter:

"angst" and "fluff" were the top two tags used for most categories so i decided to try a bit of:

<1 = more angst works than fluff, >1 = more fluff works than angst.

the other top tags for each category:

F/F and F/M: both romance (#3)

M/M: established relationship (#3)

Multi: polyamory (#3)

Other: au canon divergence (#3). "other" was used to refer to a mix of NB/trans character, thingfic, and x reader.

Gen: au canon divergence (#1). i was worried about using the otp:true filter for gen fic but the top two tags were indeed & tags (harry & severus, regulus & sirius).

[canmom]

What is the book for? - part 3

Here we go, the next part of the investigation.

[here's an intro where I talk about the three hour video essay that inspired me to do this]

[here's the first part where I argue that there's a big difference between the actual thing you do in an RPG and the book that tells you how you're allegedly supposed to be doing it]

[here's the second part where I describe some of the purposes that RPG books claim to serve in the creation of the game, and make some comments on the storygames milieu]

First up a comment! @zendoe writes...

One thing I've only seen in Jenna Moran's books, though I'm sure exists elsewhere, is that the book itself is a piece of art that is entertaining or interesting or moving in its own right. Chuubo is very funny, I read Glitch basically cover to cover and cried when I got to the end, and Wisher Theurge Fatalist is arguably meant to be read much more than it is to be played. You might even include games that are basically proofs-of-concept, hacks to prove you can put x setting into y system, etc. I'm sure a lot of games made in the heyday of /tg/ have never actually been played, and were basically just made on a lark Tangentially, this is something that often gets to me when people moralize against strong "you must/cannot do x" language in a given rulebook. I would never deny that many designers have a gross "saving the players from themselves" mentality, but at the end of the day, the only part of play a designer actually has power over is the book itself. So (assuming they're not ABA freaks) why shouldn't they use strong language if that makes the book a more interesting product?

Love this comment. You're absolutely right, one of the purposes of an RPG-book can be to just be an objet d'art in itself (I say with maximum pretentiousness), using the format of 'RPG book' to guide you to imagine a game that might exist even if it's not practical to play.

For example @xrafstar and @ramheadedgirl made a great little zine-sized book called Blood Sugar: Sweet Ambition. I doubt I'll ever actually get to play this (but never say never...), and as written it's kind of a nebulous state where it suggests stats for a D&D-like game but leaves the details vague... but it's using the format of an RPG book with its stat blocks and illustrations to tell a compelling story and provide a frame for Alco's gorgeous illustrations.

A similar example (which @lapinaraofperdition told me about) exists in Vermis I, an OSR-milieu artbook which assumes the format of a manual for an old CRPG. There is no such CRPG but it's all about the vibes. The book's on to its eighth printing now so people are well into this kinda thing.

This leads me on to one other function of RPG books worth discussing. This tends to be less of an explicitly advertised thing, but I think it's a huge part of things - amateur-anthropologist hat on...

An excuse to make up a story together - RPG book as seal of permission

Suppose I got a group of people together who had never played a TTRPG, and asked them to come to my house every week to make up stories about vikings. I think most people would find this a rather strange idea, and it would be quite a hard sell.

Suppose I got a group of people together who have at least heard of the TTRPG subculture. I have a book which says Sagas of the Icelanders on it, which looks like someone has put a lot of effort into putting it together, and costs some money. I tell them it's a cool new indie game I heard about that I want to try. Even easier if it's a game they've heard about like D&D.

This sort of overlaps with the 'auteur experience' category in the previous post, but it's sort of aimed on a different level.

When I was a child, I would make up stories on every long car journey - before that, my parents would do the same. It's normal to tell stories to children, and for children to play and make up stories through that. Now, adult life still revolves around fictional storytelling to a huge degree: in just about every society on Earth, we put tremendous resources into making and displaying films, distributing books, putting on plays.

But in modern adult life in the countries I know about, making up a fictional story is a very individual activity, and very much tied to the dynamics of publishing. If you're writing a novel, it's expected that you might think of trying to sell it one day. It is something that you specialise in. If you're good enough, it can be your job.

Playing games also gets codified and locked down: you go and join a basketball club, say, in which you are expected to learn the rules of basketball. Or play a computer game, where the rules are set by the game binary, which packages it up with other elements like music and images.

Only a few contexts give you permission to just tell a story. For example, if you're sitting around a campfire telling ghost stories. Or if the story is framed as something that really happened (whether or not it did). A joke is the major one, relying on the promise of a punchline.

If you want to tell a longer, collaborative story... well, it's lucky that someone invented a hobby called 'tabletop roleplaying', with its attendant books, magazines, forums and other subcultural trappings. You can point to that and say, hey don't worry guys! It's a done thing!

I mentioned earlier the 'conceptual inertia' of D&D. All these trappings are part of that inertia, continually performing and reinforcing the idea that 'D&D is real'.

In this case, the function of the RPG book with its glossy cover and brand name and slightly corny introduction to roleplaying at the front - and notably, its price tag - is mostly a tool to unlock this special social context where you're allowed to pretend to be an elf without it being, like, weird.

You don't need a book for that, not remotely - roleplaying has taken place on forums, in chatrooms, in MUDs, in MMOs, etc. etc. for nearly as long as we've had TTRPGs - but it is a useful tool to help you unlock the door, as it were.

In this it seems (thanks @play-now-my-lord!) that I am following in the footsteps of Roger Callilois, who offered the following definition of 'play':

it is free, or not obligatory

it is separate from the routine of life, occupying its own time and space

it is uncertain, so that the results of play cannot be pre-determined and the player's initiative is involved

it is unproductive in that it creates no wealth, and ends as it begins economically speaking

it is governed by rules that suspend ordinary laws and behaviours and that must be followed by players

it involves imagined realities that may be set against 'real life'.

Nothing about that implies that it needs a book to define its special 'circle', but elements like a subculture and book do help to bring it into existence.

On that front, let's also mention...

A way to unify the subculture - RPG book as common reference

Let's go back to reproducibility. It's not just about having something to sell.

A friend mentions playing in 'a Curse of Strahd campaign'. Curse of Strahd is an official 'adventure' for first AD&D 2e and later D&D 5e. Like most 'adventures', the book acts as a reference for a series of places and characters, and instructions for how to use them, advice on how to create a horror atmosphere, and so on. Some areas are mapped in detail, others have brief prose descriptions.

If your group has played Curse of Strahd, it probably hasn't had the exact same experience as another group. Much of the book is open to interpretation in all the ways we discussed. But, there's a good chance that you have had some experiences in common. Much like you can talk about the different areas you encounter in a computer game, or the memorable scenes in a film, you can talk to someone else who played the same adventure. 'How did your group handle the mimic door?' 'Oh it ate the rogue and we all had to form a chain and pull her out.' (This didn't happen, I've never played this adventure.)

The same also goes for more general setting elements and the game itself. An RPG lore book is something you can become an expert in. RPG rules are something you can get skilled in manipulating. And even if two D&D games take place in totally different settings, you have enough shared context to be able to know what it means for a Beholder to show up.

This is just as true of story games as it is for trad games and OSR, just with different emphases. Wanna be an expert in something? Perhaps you know the Apocalypse World principles like the back of your hand so you can give advice on how to MC it, or always know the perfect indie game for anyone's taste. And since indie games are often quite specific, two people who played the same indie game are likely to have something to talk about. Or maybe you just like to have long theoretical discussions about game design principles (*sheepishly raises hand*).

You don't remotely have to strictly follow what's in the book to take advantage of this feature. Players will constantly be recommending house rules, arguing about balance, criticising and modifying the game. That's part of the fun.

As the first post discussed, the process of defining the subculture takes place outside of the books too. In conversations, blogs, webcomics, forums, we continually hash out what this hobby that brings us together actually is. But, given that everyone's group is different, 'we probably looked at the same book' is one of the few guarantees you can make when you meet someone and learn they're into a TTRPG. Small as it is, it's a powerful starting point.

So what do we do with all this?

Well, it kinda depends which hat we're wearing, right?

For a designer, the important point to bear in mind is that an RPG book is only a prompt. You're not a computer game dev - you can't really be an engineer of a precisely tuned system where all the moving parts work together in precise harmony. You're writing a message to someone else through a noisy channel, and to my mind, they get the larger creative role anyway.

And it's not just that they'll take what they like and discard what they don't - they'll probably forget things that you put in the book, or read things in a way you didn't intend, or get caught up in the moment and fall back on familiar habits. For their part, though, they're probably not even looking for you to tell them exactly what to do and how to do it, in detail.

I tend to find many of the best moments in RPGs don't involve any looking at rulebooks. You're caught up in the story you're telling! You're feeling that feedback loop of mutual inspiration! That's what I'm personally looking for - the thing in the book is just a runway to get us towards that point.

So what are they looking for?

One view is that your job is to give them what they can't easily provide themselves 'in the moment'. There's a good article from 2016 on an OSR blog Against The Wicked City that describes it this way: if you improvise, you will likely come up with something that is either painfully generic or overly wacky. An RPG book, by contrast, ought to give you something novel, which someone has taken the time to flesh out properly. For this reason, it must avoid cliché, because it's easy to spin clichés and you don't need a book for that.

In Vi Huntsman's video, they criticise Root: The RPG for acting rather like a dictionary, attempting to clarify the trigger condition for each 'move' (a rules-construct from Apocalypse World, more on that soon) with exhaustive, repetitive elaborations. This is a fascinating corruption to me, since it seems rather opposite the ethos of earlier story games, which would much rather give you something vague and cryptic and refuse to explain. (...OK, I'm having trouble finding really good examples of that, but I definitely recall one-page games that consisted mostly of lists of evocative names and phrases). The players can be relied on to provide interpretations of whatever a Frost Shepherd might be.

The challenge to me here is to create something that gives your player enough that it's there when you need it, but still doesn't feel closed-off and is amenable to putting their own spin on it. This is rather a matter of taste.

Prose goes

On another, more abstract level, the aim of an RPG book is the same as any art: to make people feel shit and see things in a new way. This is getting back to the territory of Zendoe's comment above.

So let's get into it: why is Apocalypse World memorable, when so many derivative games borrow most of its mechanics and yet end up forgettable? Why would I love to play Chuubo's Marvellous Wish-Granting Engine even though I don't really understand how it works at all? Why do I still think about what Unknown Armies has to say about fighting? Why do I find most of Avery Alder's games offputting even if the design is novel and interesting? (y'know, beyond personal reasons that she was a cunt to my friends.)

If a TTRPG book is a device to conjure up a usable idea of 'the game' in your mind, the experience of reading it becomes really important. A huge part of what makes those games come alive in your head is that their authors can really write.

But it's not enough to just make a book that reads well, is it? The player needs the confidence to extemporise in the vein indicated by the book.

Jenna Moran's games fascinate me - but they're also rather intimidating. Her books are full of quirky asides and little jokes and stylistic flourishes. How do you play a game in a Jenna Moran way? I think if I got a suitable on-ramp like an existing group I could get up to speed, but it's definitely the kind of game which really highlights the complicated relationship between book and game to me. Which is to say I have the book but I don't feel like I could run this thing, and while I could closely read it cover to cover and rotate its ideas in my head, it would be way more helpful to join someone else's game and see how they do it.

On the other hand, Apocalypse World adopts a very conversational style of prose. It asks you to 'barf forth apocalyptica', it titles chapters things like 'advanced fuckery' and suggests you motivate NPCs with their 'clits and dicks'. It rather obtusely introduces the idea of 'moves' with 'to do it, do it' - meaning that you invoke the rules text iff a condition is met in the fiction of the game. It's stupid but in a really fun way. Apocalypse World the book has the feeling of someone sitting down with you and enthusiastically explaining the game.

Nobody taught me to play Apocalypse World - I read about it online (on the story games forums maybe?), which instilled an idea of 'what Apocalypse World looks like', got the book, liked what I saw; I ran it based on my interpretation of the book and what I'd seen online. On some level the whole process 'worked': a game was, perhaps imperfectly, reproduced in another group of people.

Something about Apocalypse World, then, got me feeling 'yeah I could do this!'. But did that have to be a game with a name and such? Could Vincent and Meguey had written the MC chapter of Apocalypse World as a series of blog posts giving system-agnostic GM advice? Perhaps, but I doubt it would have led to a whole breakout movement in the same way. It's useful to have a name to anchor things to. (Of course, there's more to Apocalypse World than that, like the whole 'moves' system which dovetails with its specified approach to GMing.)

I once ran a different PbtA game called Night Witches, about a real all-female unit of Soviet aeroplane pilots who fought in the second world war. It was a great premise for a game and was solidly designed as PbtA games go. Where I stumbled was the ability to improvise - usually something I enjoy a lot, but here I felt an urge to try and achieve historical fidelity on questions like 'what does a Soviet airwoman eat' and 'what's a plausible name for a nearby airfield' (I fucking looked at maps! such a fool). I don't speak Russian, so I would draw a blank when coming up with a name.

Clearly I should have dispensed with being historical here - it's not expected, not like my players knew better. But equally, this is where a longer list of concrete bits of random 'life in the USSR air force' flavour info would have been quite useful. The game gives you a reasonable amount of historical info, but I still felt out of my depth. Fantasy is much easier!

Running a game requires you to project a lot of confidence. You don't have to say you know all the answers, indeed I quite like to make my reasoning at least a little explicit - 'oh! what if we have this happen..?' - but you are setting the tone for the game. Confidence and enthusiasm will vary with each player to encounter the book and the experiences they bring, and it's often beyond the designer's control, but you can definitely frame your game in a way that's more or less amenable to picking up and running with it.

In the next post... a few options, hmm. We could examine the idea of 'moves' in Apocalypse World more closely - they're a bundle of a few different things, and perhaps we should evaluate how well that works, and what makes for a good move-based system. Or maybe we could revisit some of my previous game design efforts, like the RPG duels post - did I go astray?

[silmkinkmeme]

Happy 2024 from Silmkinkmeme

Happy 2024! I hope it will be great year for all of you. 2023 was pretty great for the kinkmeme thanks to all the wonderful authors and prompters.

We end the year with 240 prompts and 117 works. Our Prompt Post 1 has also seen it's fair share of activity․

And now, because it's New Year, I'm going to reveal a stat that only I can see. We have 171 UNPOSTED CLAIMS on Ao3! Of course, some of these claims won't become fics, but so many people are interested in the prompts.

Thank you all for your participation and here's to a more fruitful year.

Just for fun, I'm going to compare the kinkmeme Ao3 trends with the general Silm fandom under the cut.

Right off the bat, the kinkmeme differs from the general fandom. We have 77 explicit works, followed by mature (17), teen (15) and gen (8), while gen works are the biggest part of the larger fandom, followed by teen, explicit and mature.

As for the warnings, the first two places align - No Archive Warnings and Chose Not to Use Warnings. But after these, it's violence, rape and death in the kinkmeme in that order and death, violence and rape in the larger fandom. The kinkmeme doesn't have any fics tagged Underage, and that tag is in the last place in the general fandom.

The kinkmeme's biggest category is M/M with 56 fics. I would call it unsurprising if the larger fandom's biggest category wasn't Gen. M/M is in the second place in the fandom, while Gen is in the fourth place in the kinkmeme. F/M is in the second place in the kinkmeme and in the third place in the fandom. F/F is in the fourth place in the kinkmeme and in the fifth place in the fandom.

Now for the most interesting tags. Maedhros unsurprisingly dominates the character tag both in the kinkmeme and the larger fandom. Maglor is in the second place in both. Interestingly, Elrond who is third in the fandom doesn't even feature in the top ten character tags in the kinkmeme. In the third place, we have Fingon who is fourth in the larger fandom. Notably absent from the top ten of the kinkmeme are Sauron, Celegorm, Celebrimbor, Glorfindel and Morgoth who are all in the top ten for the fandom. Instead, we have Finrod and Curufin. The kinkmeme also has four ladies in the top ten - Aredhel, Nerdanel, Idril and Lúthien - while the fandom has none.

It gets even more interesting in the relationship section. Fingon/Maedhros is of course the most shipped pairing on Ao3, but the first place in the kinkmeme goes to Maedhros/Maglor with Russingon falling behind them. Maemags isn't even in the top ten relationships for the general fandom, which apparently prefers Maedhros & Maglor (fourth most popular relationship in the fandom and outside the top ten in the kinkmeme). Fandom straple Angbang is absent from kinkmeme's top ten and so is Silvergifting, while the former is in the second place and the latter is in the sixth place in the larger fandom. Celebrian/Elrond, Fëanor/Fingolfin, Erestor/Glorfindel, Elrond & Maglor, Fingon & Maedhros, which are all top ten relationships in the fandom didn't make it to the kinkmeme's top ten. Instead, we have five Aegnor/Andreth, four Aredhel/Maedhros and Galadriel/Lúthien, three Celebrimbor/Maeglin, Fingon/Maedhros/Maglor and minor relationships.

The only overlap between the kinkmeme and the general fandom in the additional tags are Angst (third in the kinkmeme, first in the fandom) and Hurt/Comfort (sixth in the kinkmeme, fourth in the fandom). The remaining kinkmeme tags are almost all sexual in nature - starting with PWP and Anal Sex (first and second respectively) and ending with Cunnilingus. There are no sex-related tags in the fandom's top ten additional tags.

That's all, folks. Thank you if you've read it all. Let's see how the trends change in a year.

[halfagonyandhope]

ignite the stars │ch. 3

first chapter (x); previous chapter (x)

Satine Kryze is an internationally-recognized scholar in genocide studies who recently resigned from the Department of State over her concerns regarding the agency's ethics. Ben Kenobi is a tenured professor at Georgetown University studying the use of religion to justify military conflicts. Once high school sweethearts, the two haven't spoken since parting ways for university. That is, until Satine accepts a research fellowship - at Georgetown.

---

Suddenly grateful she’d stocked up on wine, Satine reaches for the cabinet of glassware and then for a bottle next to the fridge. She’s never cared enough to learn which wines to chill and which to leave warmer, so her wine collection lives perpetually adjacent to the refrigerator. She takes a sip, knowing she wouldn’t notice the difference in taste anyway even if she had bothered to chill it.

The wine gives her permission to be bolder, and she makes her way to the couch, grabbing her laptop. Setting down the glass on a coaster, she decides the line between fuck and fuck it is now non-existent, so she opens an internet browser and types in Ben’s name.

If he’s been following her career, she needs to get up to speed on his. She will not allow him to have the upper hand here.

As it turns out, there is a lot to catch up on. He’d indeed graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point the same year she’d received her BA in anthropology from Stanford. She has to laugh when she discovers his major was sociology. Even four years removed from knowing each other, their worldviews were exactly the same and yet entirely different.

And when she’d jetted off to Oxford for her Rhodes Scholarship, he’d also been on the move. There is less on his life during this time period, but she’s able to gather he worked as a military translator abroad.

Of course he’s fluent in Arabic, she thinks, rolling her eyes. Because of course. 

When she’d worked at the Department of State, she’d been taught that some languages were more difficult than others for English-speakers to learn. Arabic - along with Korean, Mandarin, Cantonese, and Japanese - was in the “most difficult to learn” category, according to State’s categorization schema. Ben likely had spent all of his years as an undergraduate taking classes in the language, even if he didn’t have enough credits for a major, and he’d probably spent a great deal of time abroad learning to speak it well enough for him to be hired as a translator.

And him being fluent in such a difficult language? Satine groans. 

Sexy as hell.

She navigates to another webpage, wondering what he’s been up to since. Then she arches a brow, surprised. She’d come back from Oxford with her doctorate, on her way to Northwestern for a postdoc, and he’d come back from the war with a distinguished record of service - only to enroll as a graduate student at a Big Ten school in the Midwest.

He could have gone to any Ivy League of his choosing, could have had a fellowship literally anywhere in the world.

And he’d chosen Wisconsin for his doctorate?

Satine takes a large sip of wine, pondering this. He’d been in the political science department. She hums in consideration. The Ben she once knew had been radically liberal, and she suspects not much has changed in his political leanings despite the years. Moving to a purple state didn’t appear to make much sense for him.

She shakes her head. Maybe someday she’d ask him about it.

A thought occurs to her, but no - he’d moved to Madison a year before she’d accepted the postdoc at Northwestern. But their time in the Midwest had overlapped. For two years, they’d been within a three hours’ drive of each other.

The realization constricts around Satine’s heart.

Then she’d been recruited by State, and he’d been recruited by Georgetown. He’d completed a one-year postdoc there before being hired on as faculty.

Their lives were like parallel lines, forever running next to each other but never quite intersecting. Satine drains the rest of her wine.

She has a feeling the two of them are headed for that intersection now, and at full speed.

---

Ben climbs back into bed, lanky muscles still glistening with sweat and the scent of sex. One hand reaches for her jaw to cradle her face as he leans in for a soft kiss; the other hand holds a damp, warm washcloth.

“May I?” he asks, and Satine nods. He pulls the sheet away from her body, and his eyes rove over her skin. She shivers under his gaze, at the cool air.

He presses the washcloth between her legs, cleaning away the evidence of their joining. Satine wonders when she will remember how to breathe.

“Ben,” she whispers, and he meets her eyes. “How did you…how did you know exactly what to do?”

She’d been terrified the entire time. She’d had no one to ask before, had no idea what to expect. Beyond that it would undoubtedly be painful.

But it hadn’t been.

Not with him.

Ben sighs in relief. “I can’t begin to tell you how happy I am that you think that.” He finishes cleaning her and tosses the washcloth in the bathroom. Then he folds himself around her, hooking a leg over her hip, and pulls the comforter back over their naked forms.

He kisses her, slowly.

“I did a lot of reading,” he eventually admits. “Apparently, it’s not always painful if enough attention is placed on the…uh, preparation.” He swallows, and his young, wide eyes search hers. “You didn’t look like you were in pain. Were you? Was it painful?”

Satine shakes her head. “Not in the slightest,” she says. She brings his hand to her lips, committing to memory the feel of his clever fingers entering her, inside her, preparing her for what was to come. “On the contrary, it was perfect.”

She can practically feel his smile.

“I wish we had more time,” Ben says. “I can do better…the more I learn about you - ”

“Hush,” she says, kissing him again. She can’t let him continue down that line of thought, for her heart is already broken enough. She can’t let herself imagine what they might have had. “It was perfect,” she repeats.

She thinks he understands what she is thinking, and he nods. “I lo - ” he begins, but the look on her face freezes the rest of the words before they escape his throat. 

She’d thought she could hold it together until after they’d parted, but she’d thought wrong.

“Please don’t cry, Satine,” Ben begs, his face falling. “Satine.” And he pulls her more securely into his arms. “We’ll see each other again; I know we will.”

She buries her face in the crook of his neck.

“Promise me.”

“I promise you,” he says against her temple, and it is the last time she hears his voice for eighteen years.

---

Satine blinks at her alarm clock.

Damn him.

She’d been particularly proud of the way she’d buried that memory. She hadn’t dwelled on it in years. Until, of course, he’d waltzed back into her life and she’d been assigned the office next to his.

Though it’s still too early to get up, Satine rises anyway. She might as well take the early bus to campus - she wants to find her office before Ben arrives. She will not run the risk of him finding her wandering the halls again, still as lost as she was the night before.

But as it turns out, she needn’t have worried. She remembers the route he’d shown her last night, and she arrives at her office with only having taken one wrong turn. Pleased, Satine unlocks the door and steps inside.

It’s dreary and dull, with empty shelves and an empty desk save for the computer that was delivered to her yesterday. She’ll have the shelves filled with books - including the one she’d written - in no time, but she’d never been one for decorating an office space. It always meant more heartbreak when she eventually vacated said space and had to pack all her trinkets into a cardboard box. 

As she hangs her peacoat on the hook on the wall, there’s a knock at the door. Satine looks up to meet blue eyes icier than her own.

“Asajj Ventress,” says the woman, sticking out a pale hand. There’s a surety in her shoulders only gained by successfully defending one’s work against snakes and vultures; even if she hadn’t introduced herself by name, Satine would know she is speaking to a colleague rather than a grad or undergrad student.

Satine shakes the proffered hand. “Satine Kryze,” she supplies, and she takes in the woman before her.

Tall, thin, blonde, and pale like Satine, the resemblance ends there. Ventress’ platinum hair is cut short to one side and undercut on the other, and facial tattoos - possibly hinting at membership to a northern Indigenous group, Satine guesses - extend out from the lateral-most points of her eyes and lips. Despite her slim features, Satine gets the feeling that Ventress could snap her neck if she so pleased.

Ventress nods. “Oh, I know who you are,” she says. “Before you, there were two women in the department. And with Billaba on sabbatical, that meant it really was just me.”

“Want to come in for a moment?” Satine asks, gesturing at the chair in front of her desk.

Ventress doesn’t answer but strides through the threshold, her skirt flowing around her as she sits. Satine moves behind her desk and moves to sit as well. As she does, Ventress’ eyes follow her. “You’ll have already met my partner, Vos,” Ventress says.

Satine will return later to ponder the strangeness of addressing a partner by their last name. Instead, she says, “Yes, I met Dr. Vos when I interviewed here. He asked insightful questions. Seemed like he actually cared what my answers were.”

The steel of Ventress’ visage flickers for an instant as she takes in this compliment of her partner. “He’s always been better at the social aspect of academia than I am,” she says. “But I am trying to improve. The junior faculty - Vos, Kenobi, and myself - we usually go out for drinks on Friday afternoons, after the department seminar. You should join us.”

Satine’s heart stops and then works overtime the instant Ventress says Ben’s last name. It must show on her face, because Ventress lifts a platinum brow.

Before Ventress can comment, Satine accepts the invitation. “I’d like that,” she manages to get out, and suddenly there’s movement in the hallway. From her angle, she can’t make it out, but Ventress has full view.

Smoothly, Ventress calls out in a sing-song voice, “Kenobi, why the panicked expression?”

Satine tilts her head, curious, as Ben appears in the doorway, still clad in his winter outerwear. “Not a clue what you mean, Ventress,” he says, and Satine can tell he’s lying.

Ventress, it appears, can tell as well, and her eyes follow Ben’s…which have landed on Satine.

“Ahhh,” says Ventress with exaggerated understanding. She says to Satine, “So you’re the woman.”

“Beg your pardon?” says Satine, but Ben has suspiciously disappeared into his office to hide the blush that has reappeared on his cheeks, having nothing to do with the cold from outside.

Ventress smirks. “It probably would be best if you hear the details from him,” she says, eyes sweeping over Satine, who has the eerie feeling she’s suddenly being profiled. “Suffice to say that before I met Vos, Kenobi and I had a…situationship. It went nowhere fast, entirely due to the fact that he was hung up on another woman.”

Ventress stands before Satine feels the words sink in. When they finally do, Ventress is already halfway out the door.

“See you Friday,” she says over her shoulder, and Satine just blinks.

Well, she can’t begrudge Ben once having feelings for Ventress. If she weren’t attached to someone, Satine thinks, I’d probably fall for her, too. Still a little off-kilter, she stands and makes her way to Ben’s office.

It’s everything hers is not, with pictures in frames on his desk and fabric hung on the walls, such as the kufiya near the window and a scarf adorned with what she suspects are Russian folk motifs near the shelves. Ben looks up as she enters, and Satine reaches out for the door frame. She finds herself internally swearing at him again.

He’s wearing glasses, and it’s making her knees weak.

Trying to ignore the feeling, she says, “So, you and Ventress?”

Ben groans and throws himself in the chair behind his desk. “She had to tell you. Hence my panicked look,” he says.

Satine ponders this. "You didn't want me to know. Why?"

"She will surely tell you all sorts of ridiculous stories about me, all of them true.”

Satine snickers as Ben continues.

“Ventress and I had fun,” he says. “I don’t regret our time together. But the best thing that came out of it was that I introduced her to Quinlan. You see, at the time, Ventress wasn’t in the department. She was adjuncting over in Russian Studies, and Quinlan had just started a postdoc here. They hit it off, eloped, and soon after applied for the same position in International Studies. The department decided they liked them both equally and arranged a dual career hire to incentivize them sticking around.”

His face had heated again while he explained, and a sly smile crosses Satine's face. “You met Ventress because she was your Russian instructor.”

Ben removes his glasses so he can scrub a hand down his face. He groans again. “I was only auditing the class,” he says. "And in fairness, I stopped auditing the class as soon as things...escalated."

Satine tries to hide her laughter behind her hand. “So you’d mastered Arabic and decided you needed another language to tackle?”

“Someone spent last night Googling.”

She waves a dismissive hand. “Last night I sent you a LinkedIn request, so you already knew that.” Satine crosses her arms against her chest. “So you audited a Russian class? For fun? How fluent are you now?”

He responds in what she suspects is perfect Russian.

“So she was a good instructor, then.” In more ways than one, apparently.

If possible, Ben’s face becomes more red. “Is this revenge for me teasing you about getting lost? Because I’ll refrain from mentioning it ever again if you pledge to never bring up my relationship with Ventress.”

Satine shakes her head. “Not a chance. This is far better dirt to have on you than what you have on me.” She makes to step out of the office but pauses, looking back. “Ventress invited me to your happy hour on Friday. I think this could be the start of a beautiful friendship.”

She grins at Ben’s dismayed look, and takes her leave.

[nuwanders]

so tell us about velothi philosophy :3c how does it differ, to say, its imperial counterparts? how has it changed across time?

Where to start!! Going to try my hardest to produce a semi-coherent answer here lol

quick note before i get into it— due to the nature of religion in the Elder Scrolls, i’m going to treat theology and philosophy as more or less the same discipline. there will obviously still be some discussions which fall more squarely into one field or the other, but in a world where ‘gods’ are demonstrably real and regularly involving themselves with the affairs of mortals, there’s going to be a great deal more overlap than there is irl. 

with that out of the way, i’ll limit my discussion to three main areas of philosophy in which Velothi attitudes differ the most from their Imperial counterparts; (1) the determinism/free will debate, (2) notions of faith vs veneration, and (3) the relationship between religion and morality. This isn’t too long dw but I’ve put it under a read more just in case

1. determinism vs free will

the imperial pantheon being headed by a god of time would, i think, have significantly shaped imperial philosophy. teslore is riddled with prophecies, as well as the Elder Scrolls themselves and ‘heroes’ as a category of beings who are uniquely capable of ruling their own destiny. ignoring the doylist explanation for a moment (that heroes are player characters in an otherwise scripted video game), it is clear that Imperial philosophy is dominated by a deterministic streak. 

Velothi philosophy however would fall (imo) more in the compatibilism camp. rather than our futures being predetermined by what is written in the Scrolls, I think the Velothi might say instead that what is written in the Scrolls is determined by what we, in the future, choose to do. ‘Outside of time’ =/= ‘before time’— by which I mean that if the Scrolls truly are from outside of time, it would be nonsensical to conclude that the contents of the scrolls is what causes certain events to then occur— because that would imply some kind of linear progression.

why do i think this? i won’t lie it is 80% headcanon, however the ability of Mephala to ‘pull but a single thread’ and unravel the weave of fate reflects, i think, the central position which the ability to determine one's own destiny holds in Velothi identity. An Imperial philosopher might say that Daedric Princes, like mortals, do not exist ‘outside time’ in the way that Akatosh does, so Mephala’s own actions would themselves be considered pre-determined. But I think the Velothi philosopher here would just cycle back to the compatibilist argument outlined above. Dunmer are a proud and independent people and I think they would strongly resist any attempt to imply that they do not have control over their own actions lol

2. faith vs veneration

Also central to Velothi philosophy and culture is the notion that respect and power must be earned, and i think this would apply to their gods as much as to themselves. Veloth turned away from the Aedra after Boethiah came to him in his dreams and visions. Why dedicate your life to the worship of invisible—and seemingly impotent—gods when the daedra are right there, showing themselves through positive action to be worthy of your fear and your love?

I think the notion of ‘faith’—being a belief in something which cannot be proven, both in spite of and because of that fact—would be dismissed by the Velothi as fanciful and ridiculous— a way for the elite to control the masses. This isn’t to say that they don’t believe in the aedra (there is a text somewhere in Morrowind which suggests that House Redoran, at least, adopted some kind of aedra worship during Imperial occupation), however they wouldn’t consider the aedra worthy of veneration. And Akatosh in the Velothi sense might be understood a little differently— perhaps even as a simple literary device designed to personify what is otherwise just the abstract notion of time.

3. ethics, and the relationship between religion and morality

It’s worth taking care here not to map Christian notions of morality and sin onto the Imperial cult, however there are some broad similarities. The Divines don’t necessarily represent moral virtues, however they all encapsulate some kind of virtue in the more holistic, Aristotelian sense; and the fact they are each virtuous in some way is taken both as reason to worship them and as reason to emulate those characteristics. (Not gonna get into the Euthyphro dilemma, but regardless of which view you think they'd take, it is clear there is some kind of relationship here). 

The same cannot be said of the Good Daedra, nor of the Tribunal. Any ‘virtue’ these figures happen to possess is incidental to their status as figures deserving of worship. This is not to suggest that Dunmer have no moral code or care not for virtues such as generosity or benevolence; it’s just that ethics is seen as divorced from divine law (ignoring the above mentioned lore text which says the exact opposite wrt House Redoran ;_;)

At the extreme end of this spectrum you find Telvanni ethics– “According to Telvanni principles, the powerful define the standards of virtue.” Which is very Nietzschean lmao. But I don’t think this would reflect Velothi ethics at large. If I were to summarise, I would say that the Velothi reject any notion of morality as intrinsically good, but that they generally recognise moral virtues as instrumentally valuable. Humility and selflessness in the Alessian, slave-morality sense are rejected, but social cooperation, justice and generosity are rightfully recognised as qualities which lead to the betterment of society overall.

--

given how long this is already i will save the question of how velothi philosophy changes over time for another post :') the Fourth Era transition from tribunal worship to the New Temple is something i'm exploring in my soon-to-be-published little novella hehe. thank you for the ask! <3

and tagging @ervona who expressed some interest in this topic >:)

[gremoria411]

Mobile Suit Generations in the Universal Century

Alright, another lineage post, kinda (I will finish that 00 one eventually).

Now in my post about how the Zaku series changed over time, I mentioned briefly that I don’t really see the Universal Century Gundam series as being much of a lineage, primarily because it’s an absolute mess. However, I do want to do a post talking about the Gundam “line” in some more detail at some point. So I thought I’d make this post beforehand as a sort of preliminary excercise. Because it’s rather difficult to talk about Gundams in universal century without talking about Mobile Suit Generations themselves.

So, What are Mobile Suit Generations?

In brief; as mobile suit technology in Universal Century developed, there were a number of concepts that would revolutionise the entire field, and lead to mobile suit design being completely different as time went on. New technologies, new theories, new design ethos, that sort of thing. And because Gundam units were so often cutting-edge, these new ideas would typically be applied to them. A new generation represents a massive leap forward for the technology, meaning that development occurred very quickly. I’ve thrown around the terms before, typically when talking about fourth-generation mobile suits, but I figured I’d do a post outlining the different mobile suit generations, what their characteristics are, give some examples and talk about any noteworthy oddities.

Disclaimer: as it ever is with UC, there’s a lot that doesn’t divide cleanly here. Some mobile suits are easier to categorise than others, and there can be a lot of overlap between the generations, so I’ll be looking more at broad trends than categorising everything. I’m also gonna skip over a lot of detail here in the name of this post actually being of reasonable length.

First Generation Mobile Suits

Named retroactively and also the easiest to categorise. First-Generation mobile suits encompasses every mobile suit built prior to the Gryps War - Zaku’s, GM’s, RX-78’s, Pale Riders, the Gundam Development Project - all First-Gen mobile suits. First-Gen’s a broad category because it’s every suit on both sides of the OYW, and because mobile suits were still a very new technology there was an absolute range on design ethos and styles. First-Generation mobile suits really only share a timeframe of manufacture, there isn’t really much else to tie them together.

Second Generation Mobile Suits

The only (technically) Mobile Suit Generation to straight-up replace its predecessor and also one of only two generations to incorporate actual definitions (at least as far as I can tell). While the later generations tended to focus on one aspect of mobile suits, Second-Generation mobile suits were an all-around improvement over the second generation. They were characterised by three main features:

The movable frame - rather than just providing structure as was the case previous, the movable frame incorporates all the critical components required to actually move the unit, with the weapons armour and propellant tanks being externalised. This allows for easier maintenance, greater mobility and improved energy efficiency.

360-degree panoramic cockpit and linear seat - technically two improvements, but a “better cockpit” in a nutshell. The 360-degree panoramic cockpit allowed for a much greater field of view for the pilot, especially when compared to the old, cramped cockpits of the OYW, while the linear seat helped reduce the effect of g-forces on the pilot (and also made it easier to eject in the case of being shot down).

Gundarium y alloy - one of several refined versions of the original Gundarium used in the RX-78 series, Gundarium y was lightweight and durable, making it the armour of choice for second-generation mobile suits, allowing them to shrug off blows that would be lethal to earlier models, while remaining manoeuvrable enough that they could dodge such blows.

The most famous Second-Generation mobile suits would be the Gundam Mk-II and the Rick Dias, despite the fact that they each lacked one feature from the above list (the Mk-II had the older titanium alloy ceramic composite armour, whereas the Rick Dias lacked a movable frame). As previously mentioned, Second-generation mobile suits became the benchmark going forwards, and this wasn’t changed until the advent of miniaturised mobile suits in the U.C. 110’s. The Jegan, which would be the mainline mobile suit for the federation for over sixty years, was a Second-Generation mobile suit, typically likened to a mass-produced Gundam Mk-II.

Which brings us to our first oddity I want to talk about - the Dowas Custom. The original Dowas was the final production unit of the Zeon’s Dom line during the One Year War. The precise shakedown of their use and deployment is unclear - the Dowas is derived from the Rick Dom II, which was part of the latewar United Maintenance Plan, but there are reports of Dowas Desert types conducting operations in the wake of the Battle of Odessa - they could be early prototypes, or the Desert units came first and were later refined into the regular Dowas, or the Pezun Dowadge doesn’t count because it wasn’t a production unit…….

Anyway, at least one Dowas unit was brought to Axis by Zeon remnants fleeing A Baoa Qu, where it would be refined and upgraded with Axis’ latest technologies, and then supplied to the nascaent AEUG. That unit was the MS-09SS Dowas Custom, seen in Anaheim Laboratory Log. I won’t spoil the precise details of the hand-off, but you can probably guess from the colour scheme that it involves a certain individual who’s never heard of this Char Aznable fella, dear me no.

But the reason I’m talking about the Dowas Custom here is that it would be reverse-engineered in order to create the Rick Dias, one of the first Second-Generation Mobile suits. But where does that leave the Dowas Custom? Is it First-Gen, or Second-Gen? Well, it’s got Gundarium Alloy Armour (presumably y, since it’s the best one), however we know it doesn’t have a movable frame - neither the original Dom, nor its successor the Rick Dias incorporate one, so it’s very unlikely it has one. So then we come to the cockpit, and I’ve genuinely no idea what kind it employs. So I tend to consider it as an in-between, generation wise.

Third-Generation Mobile Suits

Transformable mobile suits, in a nutshell. Transformable mobile suits were considered an huge advantage during the gryps war, as they allowed for faster deployment, increased scouting range and, in many cases, were able to be transferred from Earth to space more easily than standard mobile suits. The latter half of the Gryps War and early stages of the First Neo Zeon War (Zeta Gundam to ZZ Gundam), are typically considered the golden age of Transformable mobile suits, with such luminaries such as the Zeta Gundam, Bawoo, Messala and Gabthley. Due to the aforementioned advantages, Third-Gen suits continued to develop after this period, giving rise to the Rezel and Delta Plus seen during Unicorn.

Interestingly, what is technically the first Third-Generation mobile suit, the Delta Gundam, was laid down during the early stages of the Gryps War but never built, simply because Anaheim couldn’t figure out how to make the frame work until Kamille Bidan managed to fix the problems with the Zeta, at which point Anaheim was so busy with other projects (like the Zeta Project) that they didn’t have time to review the Delta Gundam until after the war.

However, it is nice to have at least one generation with the relatively simple description of “if it transforms, it’s probably a third-generation suit”

Right?

If it wasn’t for this fucking thing.

Cards on the table, I really like the Gundam Mk-V. It’s nice. But, maddeningly, it’s also one of the only suits that we have an actual, in-universe definition for which mobile suit generation it falls into - “A third-generation mobile suit with the firepower of a fourth”. So it’s a third-generation mobile suit that doesn’t transform. What. Also, It’s the only thing that’s like this - The Gaza-C is a third-gen, because it can transform - The Jegan is a second-gen, because it doesn’t fit into third or fourth-gen categories. Why is a non-transforming suit a third-gen? Very annoying. Based on this, I’m led to conclude that what qualifies a suit as a member of the Third-Generation *has* to be something to do with frame structure, not necessarily transformation, given that the Mark-V doesn’t transform (Or it’s an error on the part of whoever wrote the description).

Fourth Generation Mobile Suits

Speaking of, I should really define fourth generation mobile suits, shouldn’t I? In one word: firepower. Fourth-Generation mobile suits were a product of greatly improved generator output, plus several noteworthy developments in Newtype tech. Any Newtype-specialist mobile suit after the gryps war is most likely part of the Fourth-Generation. The best-known fourth-generation mobile suits would be the ZZ Gundam, S Gundam and Döven Wolf. Axis was a major leader in Fourth-Gen tech, with such units as the Hamma-Hamma and, of course, the Qubeley. Several of these mobile suits were also combiners, such as the aforementioned Gundam’s, though this was later dropped as it led to compatibility and maintenance issues. Fourth-Generation mobile suits were also comparatively rare compared to those of earlier generations - likely due to the rarity of the newtypes that were typically their favoured pilots. The Döven Wolf has the distinction of being one of the few mass-produced Fourth-Generation mobile suits, likely because Axis had the resources to devote to it. Fourth-Generation mobile suits are also unique in that we (arguably) see an upper limit to the technology - the Gundam Unicorn, which is pretty goddamn scary.

Fifth-Generation Mobile Suits

A very easy one here, a) there’s only two mobile suits classed as fifth-generation at present - the Xi Gundam and the Penelope; and b) it’s got a nice, simple definition - fifth-generation mobile suits are equipped with a Minovsky craft system, allowing for unrestricted flight within the atmosphere.

The Minovsky Craft system is essentially how Gundam deals with all those horribly un-aerodynamic flying mobile armours - they incorporate minovsky craft systems, allowing for flight within the atmosphere (like the Psycho Gundam and the Adzam). The Xi Gundam and Penelope however, are actually light and aerodynamic, meaning that they can function more as mobile interceptors as opposed to flying city blocks. Honestly, I don’t have much more to say on this one.

Miniaturised Mobile Suits

Not really a generation per se, but I figured I’d cover my bases here. Miniaturised mobile suits were pioneered by SNRI, the Earth Federation’s in-house weapon development team, in around the UC 90’s to UC 100’s (such as the Loto and Heavygun). It eventually became standard practice after SNRI development data was stolen in UC 116, allowing other manufacturers to develop miniaturised mobile suits.

The main distinctions between miniaturised mobile suits and their forebears is, well, they were smaller. The Gundam F90 stood at only 14.8 meters tall compared to the original RX-78’s 18 meter height. This was due to a miniaturisation of the thermonuclear reactor used in mobile suits, and the development on new armour materials that allowed the armour and mobile frame to be made lighter without compromising its structural strength. Miniaturised mobile suits also used less resources than traditional ones to construct, allowing militaries to get more bang-for-their-buck, as it were (though given the prevalence of large mobile armours in late UC, being able to spend those resources elsewhere may also have something to do with it).

[musings-on-wisteria]

Exploring The Elements (Via Comparison)

This post is about how I came up with my version of the Four Elements. My variations are not exactly unique, but there are some key departures from traditional depictions that I think make my system stand out. If it’s not obvious, this is entirely my UPG.

Context: While the elements are the backbone of my witchcraft practice and are absolutely part of my spells, I view each element as more than just a tool or an energy, but as a category. For me, each element has its own lessons, its own mysteries, its own aspects and its own path for a practitioner to walk down. That being said, I think they're absolutely categories you can play with. I took the elements and made them more sacred than sorcerous; you may want to make them more secular than spiritual. That's totally your call!

For starters, I mentioned in this post that I prefer to work with the elements as they appear in my life. When I began my practice, I meditated on each element and followed the threads that it reminded me of.

To take Wind as an example, I thought of letters, weather vanes and feathers. From that I could extrapolate correspondences of communication, ideas, omens, change, exchange, favors, levity and freedom.

That's a LOT from three objects.

From there, I applied the correspondences to my life- where did I see omens, experience exchange and communication, feel free? Pretty quickly, Wind's domain became the internet, as well as academic study, games, and travel.

Once I had done this- and mind you, I didn't sit down and write out every element one by one, it was a more organic process- I wanted to find the intricacies of the system. Some of the elements seemed to overlap- Earth and Water, for instance. I wanted to know what separated them, made each its own path.

That's where comparative groupings showed up. Dividing my four elements into two sets of two as many ways as I could was a pretty useful way to figure out what they were and what they weren't. These categories are fairly arbitrary, but they help me understand the connections between the elements and solidify their meanings. You can see how this is done with the traditional four Elements, with "passive" and "active," "feminine" and "masculine," and all of that. There are three axis that I measure them through; Hearth vs. Flux, Aspirational vs. Foundational, and Energetic vs. Organic.

The Hearth elements (Fire and Earth) are physical. Their domain is the solid and mundane. They’re called “Hearth” because their properties are more familiar to us, being steady and predictable. The Flux elements, by comparison (Water and Wind) are shifting and metaphysical. They have influence over things that only exist in our minds- our thoughts, ideas, magic. They also fluctuate, hence the name. 

The Aspirational elements (Wind and Earth) have goals that are either endless- they can never be truly achieved- or which I gravitate towards in good times. When I’m doing well, I focus on these things, which encourage growth, progress and self-expression. They concern the external world, beyond an individual person. The Foundational elements (Water and Fire) meanwhile, are more about maintenance and healing. In bad times, I come to these elements for renewal and comfort. They focus on the internal, the self, the- well, foundational. These are paths that set habits and routines.

The Energetic elements (Wind and Fire) are more energy than spirit. They tend to be simpler, more linear, more man-made and more morally neutral. They’re more sorcery than spirituality, if that makes sense. Organic elements (Earth and Water), by contrast, are more spirit than energy. They’re complex. They like cycles and feelings and spiritual development. They like dealing with people rather than products. (I have a whole UPG around energy and spirit- long story short, I see spirit as condensed energy and energy as unfocused spirit- but that's another story.)

So, reading through that, you can probably already glean a lot of my elemental associations. That's how it's supposed to work- through these three comparative lenses, you can triangulate my correspondences in a really satisfying way.

For instance, you now know that Water is a Flux element- changing, metaphysical, mind-focused- a Foundational element- self-focused, healing and internal- and Organic- specializing in spirituality, cycles and feelings. The sentence writes itself- Water is about a person’s relationship to themselves and their internal feelings, the cycles of healing and development, and spiritual wisdom.

Additionally, that tells you how I might use Water in a spell! Personally, I almost never use only one element- it's much more potent to blend them. In my practice, Water will be present in both a cleansing and an emotional healing spell- but in the former, I'd combine it with Wind (the Flux Elements like movement and shifting things around), while in the latter I would add more Fire (because the Foundational Elements are eternal sources of renewal and self-love).

This has been a long post, so if you made it all the way through, thanks! I may make more posts outlining my specific, in-depth profiles for each of the elements, for my own record as much as anything else. Keep in mind these will be entirely based on my UPG and highly personal to my craft.

PLEASE, please please please add your own UPG around the elements to this post- or tag me in your own- I would really love to see what other people make of these four!

[firedjinni]

Some analysis of the overlap between Homestuck chumhandles/trolltags and Rain World iterator names (and pseudonyms)

because what else do you do when you're bored and have Imminent Tasks to do?

To start with, though, some analysis of each individual category to formalize the patterns and "rules" of both naming types!

Chumhandles actually follow a pretty consistent set of rules other than the session-specific ATGC initial conventions! In particular:

It must be either two words exactly, or in the rare edge case of a session leader, one word split between a prefix and a noun (ectoBiologist, carcinoGeneticist). One is too few; three is right out.

No chumhandle is less than four syllables, or more than eight, although one-syllable words are allowed in either half (e.g. twinArmageddons, arachnidsGrip). The longest individual words seem to cap out at 5 syllables (terminally, auxiliatrix).

The most common format is adjective/modifier + noun, with the noun generally being some kind of person or role. (i.e. trickster, biologist, therapist, godhead, gnostic, toreador, geneticist, auxiliatrix, calibrator, culler, gumshoe, gnostalgic, terror) but not always (armageddons, catnip, grip, umbra/ge, testicle, aquarium). The few remaining exceptions either 1) put the noun first (apocalypseArisen), 2) consist of an adverb and adjective instead (terminallyCapricious), or… whatever the fuck Dirk and Tavros had going on (timaeusTestified, adiosToreador).

There is an overall preference for "fancy" and somewhat obscure word choices.

Non-english words are uncommon but acceptable (adiosToreador).

Actually, I'm not sure they even have to be real words either; "gnostalgic" seems to be more of a pun than anything else

For the humans, there tends to be a trend of specific cultural references, generally gnostic or otherwise religious (gardenGnostic, golgothasTerror, timaeusTestified (philosophy but we'll count it), tipsyGnostalgic, arguably turntechGodhead); in trolltags, there's a trend of negative descriptors, violence, and references to the apocalypse.

Iterator names seem to be a little looser overall, probably not helped by the multiple groups of devs not always 100% agreeing re: lore. Thus we can probably say more about acceptable chumhandles than acceptable iterator names, although templates clearly do exist.

Names use whole words and form full phrases, though those phrases don't have to be nouns

Permissible nouns tend to be restricted in category - mostly inanimate natural entities (Moon, Pebble, Sun(s), Straw, Wind, etc) or abstract qualities/behaviors/concepts (Innocence, Harassment)

For natural objects, nouns tend to be simple - one syllable, two at most. More abstract qualities are allowed longer, fancier nouns.

Observed formats/templates include: "[number] [optional adj.] [object]" (Five Pebbles, Seven Red Suns), "[verb]s [preposition] [object]" (Looks to the Moon), "[adjective] [object or abstract quality]" (Unparalleled Innocence, Grey/Chasing Wind, "Erratic Pulse"; in Downpour: Pleading Intellect, Secluded Instinct, Wandering Omen, Gazing Stars), "[noun] of [object]" (Sliver of Straw; in Downpour: Epoch of Clouds). No Significant Harassment is a bit of an outlier but arguably fits group 3, with "No Significant" as the adjective/descriptor part.

The first category of names also seems to overlap the strongest with Ancient naming conventions, so the type of object could speculatively be extended to non-natural objects like bells, beads, etc (though those also seem to be mainly low-tech and "simple" objects), but there's not clear precedent for it.

Overall tone of names is neutral to positive, which makes sense given the context of iterators as the Ancients' "gift to the world" and all that

Looking at these analyses, we can find there is surprisingly small overlap between the two naming conventions! (Although it definitely exists.)

The greatest overlap is probably in iterator names that fit the third template ([adj.] [obj/quality]), most of which can comfortably pass for chumhandles so long as they're just two words and fit the four-syllable minimum. So erraticPulse [EP], unparalleledInnocence [UI], pleadingIntellect [PI] etc scan pretty well.

Chumhandles to iterator names is actually a lot harder, mostly because the range of appropriate nouns for iterator names seems to be narrower overall, and many chumhandles make more explicit cultural or material references which don't translate well into Rain World. Additionally, a lot of trolltags have very negative leaning names, while iterator names tend to be more neutral or even positive in tone. The best few I'd say are maybe Terminally Capricious, Apocalypse Arisen (doesn't strictly fit the naming template but has the vibes~ ok), Undying Umbrage and tentatively Arachnid's Grip (if arachnids can be assumed sufficiently existent for the reference to work), but none of them fully fit the vibes for a proper iterator IMO. Ironically, I've had better luck taking a page out of SBURB Glitch FAQ's book and converting soundtrack titles - Endless Climb, Upward Movement, Plays the Wind, Carefree Action, etc.

This was totally unnecessary but uh. Yeah.

[adarkrainbow]

Given @princesssarisa has been sharing thoughts and infos about the French variations of Cinderella I just wish to add a little info which might be of interest for those into Cinderella stuff.

I have spoken before of what the Delarue-Tenèze is, but if you missed the post, here is a freshener. Delarue-Tenèze is the French equivalent of the European Aarne-Thompson (or ATU if you expand it a bit more). "Delarue-Tenèze" is the shortened form of the name of the two authors of this work (Paul Delarue and Marie-Louise Tenèze), who created "Le Conte populaire français, Catalogue raisonné des versions de France et des pays de langue française d'outre-mer" (The French folk-tale, Reasoned catalogue of the variants of France and of French-speaking countries beyond-sea). The Delarue-Tenèze is the complete typification, classification and catalogue of French folktales and oral fairytales, a "local ATU" if you wish. It does take into account the most famous literary variations of some fairytales (such as Perrault and d'Aulnoy's texts) but only in regard of how their massive popularity caused them to influence and "return" to the domain of orality and folklore (such as how Perrault invented the "red" in Little Red Riding Hood, and the "boots" in Puss in Boots, and as such in the centuries following his publication these elements became part of the oral-told folktales).

And when it comes to Cinderella, the Delarue-Tenèze highlights how in the French folktale tradition the Cinderella-type is not at all a type in itself, but rather one sub-type of a larger fairytale story.

This was already higlighted by the ATU itself, which classified them as the two sides of the "Persecuted Heroine" fairytale type (510A and 510B), but "Cinderella" and "Donkeyskin" in oral fairytales are closely related, frequently overlaping, and regularly confused, and even more so in French oral tales - it needed a Perrault's intervention to cut clear those two types of fairytales.

But here is where the Delarue-Tenèze takes a further step as opposed to the ATU: the Delarue-Tenèze adds a third variation to this "Persecuted Heroine" type, one that the ATU had classified as its own type (511), "One-Eye, Two-Eyes, and Three-Eyes". While for the ATU this fairytale type is close enough to Donkeyskin/Cinderella to be right next to them in the list, but different enough to be its own thing, for the Delarue-Tenèze "One-Eye, Two-Eyes, Three-Eyes" should be, in the context of French folktales, the "510C", due to being much too close and much too linked to the previous two types to be separate.

This is notably why the Delarue-Tenèze, which usually has an "analysis" segment for each fairytale type, decided to do one single analysis for all these three "categories", insisting upon how the intricate relationship and confused similarities between the three make it impossible to clearly set them apart in the oral tradition. As such, in the folklore of France, "Cinderella", "Donkey-skin" and "One Eye, Two Eyes, Three Eyes", are just one and the same. (As opposed to the literary tradition where Cinderella and Donkeyskin are clearly separate, and One Eye Two Eye Three Eyes is unknown)