#trying to replicate the experience for you

[soul-controller]

Compensating The Cashmaster

When Matthew pulled into the driveway of his house, the 35-year-old was shocked to see the souped up blue Dodge Challenger sitting there. Although he knew the driver of the car, their appearance on his doorstep wasn’t something that he had expected to see any time soon. But as he finally parked his car and exited, a quick glance over to the angered glare being given to him by Josh, the man standing against his front porch, revealed that this wasn’t a kind and nice visit from an acquaintance.

As a dead weight suddenly dropped into his stomach, Matthew’s pace was glacial as he slowly approached the front door. Opting to keep his lips sealed until they were both in his house, Matthew avoided eye contact entirely as he unlocked the door and pulled on the knob – standing back as the handsome and muscular man wasted no time barging into the residence.

“Are you trying to piss me off, Matthew,” the other man inquired – making his way into the living room before falling back into the small couch.

In response, Matthew’s breathing ramped up as his voice came out entirely weak and airy. “Oh uh, of course not sir! I sent you everything I could afford this paycheck,” he responded, looking over to his cashmaster and attempting to seem as remorseful as possible.

To any outsider who looked at the two of them together, it was clear that they were not close friends or anything. If anything, they resembled co-workers forced to work together or a college jock and his weak-willed nerdy tutor – which paled in comparison to the truth of their relationship. In actuality Matthew was one of Josh’s paypigs, a man who got off on giving away his money to someone he deemed hotter and “far more deserving”.

“Well, $500 isn’t enough,” Josh coldly replied, crossing his arms against his broad and muscular torso – which only made him look even more imposing to Matthew. “Get me another $500 by the end of the day or else…”

Despite wanting so badly to please his cashmaster and keep their relationship on good terms, such an ask was something that the full-time low-level office employee simply couldn’t manage. As he informed Josh as such and explained his reasoning, it seemed clear that the man wasn’t taking the news too well. In fact, all Matthew heard before everything went black was “If you’re not going to give me my money, then I’ll just find a better use for you…”

* * * * *

“You fags like you what you see, huh?” Josh grunted towards the camera, a cocky smirk on his face as he lifted his arms up and flexed his immense biceps. “If you want more, give me all of your fucking money!”

As he watched the money begin to funnel into his account, the cocky cashmaster looked down at his skintight blue compression tee that left nothing to the imagination. Every well-defined line of musculature from his bicep veins to his sculpted six-pack was on full display for the audience and the man loved seeing all of these pathetic losers fawning over him. Although he had the ego the size of Jupiter, the 24-year-old couldn’t help but give some props to his most quintessential prop of the stream – the tee that had once been Matthew, one of his pathetic paypigs. Despite living in a nice house with plenty of things he could have sold to make the extra money Josh desired, the paypig simply said he couldn’t and that genuinely pissed the man off. 

Luckily for the cashmaster though, his magical ancestry allowed him to tap into innate abilities to help teach lessons to paypigs that refused to comply. Any time one of them couldn’t provide what he demanded, he’d find a new use for them in order to help make up the remaining amount of money that they had shorted him. So as the hundreds of dollars quickly pushed past a thousand, it was clear that Matthew had certainly earned back his humanity at the end of the session. Unfortunately for him, the man’s extremely submissive personality made it highly likely that the man would replicate Josh’s experiences with other former-clothing paypigs as those individuals would purposely stop paying in order to relive their inanimate fantasies due to the innate humiliation and helplessness it provided…

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[an-android-in-a-tutu]

Hi everybody I have reached the level of sleep deprivation where music just starts playing in my head and I can't stop it.

[bacchuschucklefuck]

Can you expand on what you mean by Baron being "too cool" to really fit a horror monster? It's a very interesting concept and I'd love to hear your thoughts. Is it that they're too active/involved/tangible and it detracts from their scariness?

I feel like I should preface this with a wall of disclaimers lmao 1/I am a hardcore, down-to-the-marrow, avid, deeply sincere horror enthusiast, esp. horror creatures. this usually means my mileage is vastly different from the average populace's, and my scaredy bone has been disintegrated by longterm exposure. most things in a piece of horror media won't scare me! so I practically never use that on its own as the scale to talk abt horror experiences, but when something does scare me it's always a special occasion to be treasured. 2/canon d20 is never really meant to be horror horror, and for good reasons: it doesn't fit the company's output, it takes a kind of carelessness in production estimation that is always a huge risk, it's often vulnerable in a way that kinda goes against how TTRPGs usually facilitates vulnerability, and for most people it's just! stressful! d20, even with the "horror-themed" seasons, generally just plays with horror tropes and stays focused in its goal of being a comedy improv tabletop theater show. 3/fantasy high's chosen system is DnD, which as I've mentioned before is before all a combat-based game system, which means the magic circle of play is drawn based on stats that facilitate and prioritize combat. want or not this affects every interaction you have in the game, and given fantasy high's concept from the ground up (everyone's going to school of DnD stuff to get better at DnD) it's doubly relevant. 4/This Is Fine I have no quarrel with this. my meters are internal, I do not ask this show to be anything it doesn't advertise itself to be, and what it is is fucking great! I like it! when I expand on this ask's question it will be like a physicist going insane in a lab. that's the mindset we're going in with.

disclaimers done. my stance on horror as a genre is that it's a utility genre rather than a content genre or a demographic genre; it is the discard of narratives. it's the trash pile. horror, above being scary, is about being ugly and messy, it's the cracks on the ground any story inevitably steps over to stay a genre that isn't horror. the genre's been around long enough to develop a codex and a general language that medias and makers and enthusiasts of the genre can use to talk about and build onto, but if you go into individual pieces there's really no unifying Horror Story. one person's beautiful life can be another's horror story, it's just how it is.

this makes The Monster a deeply intriguing piece of the genre. thing is a monster is in a decent percentage of any story - it's just when the antagonist force steps into something past a certain line traced out in the story's world. monstrousness is in pretty much every western fantasy story, it's in any story with a hero and something to vanquish or win; more than anything it's a proxy of that thing up there. the line in a narrative's world. the monster is the guard of the unknown lands, where heroic, civilized people don't tread.

what does this mean in the context of horror? the genre is about that perceived lawlessness, that "unknown land" so to say. we're in the monster's home. that's the literary context that we often walk into a horror piece with; the monster knows more than you about where you are. it may not understand you, but it holds more information than you, and with that it moves swifter than you, has more covered than you, and is more assured in its existence in this context than you. it's a struggle to catch up to it, it's nigh impossible to get one over it, and you're never sure it'll 100% work, because you just don't have the information necessary to.

with that framing you can kinda see where I'm coming from here: horror's often about the breaking of rules. I always think a monster's most effective when it breaks well-established rules of both existence and visual storytelling. think Possum (2018) or Undertale's Omega Flowey or the Xenomorph Queen - unique change in medium, unique change in graphic, unique change in design language, etc. in that sense I actually really like how canon baron plays out: they don't really function like anything else in the fantasy high universe, the bad kids have not managed to kill them when they've felled literal gods, their domain in fhjy literally introduces new mechanics to encompass their existence! from an experience design standpoint they slap mad shit. BUT! I can't help finding their character, like as a character riz (and the other bad kids, eventually) interact with, to be very... coherent? in design. this is kinda hard for me to articulate in words, it's more often a sense you get once you've looked at enough of these scrumptious fuckers, their general design and the way they show up is just kinda too clean, so to say. always kinda newly made? fresh unboxed. it, once again, makes sense for their lore - they are looking for more about themself from riz - and their function - they're an antagonist in a game experience, they're meant to be interacted with in a way that produces results and meshes with the existing magic circle - but that shininess takes away from the implied history they should have dominion over and the person they're haunting doesn't.

from another angle there is kinda something there about how put-together canon baron is as a concept; the domain they call home is riz's deep-seeded fears, extremely vulnerable things he's drawn borders around to quarantine and refused to walk into. things that from his perspective would irreversibly shatter certain pleasant fictions his world is built on top of. canon baron, While Extremely Cool, I feel is kinda too neat to connect with and signify the apocalyticized mess that'd result from this paradigm shift. the part where they're in riz's briefcase and looking through every mirror is Very Cool And Fucked Up! but ultimately the show draws a line around them as well, by making game-physical, tangible spaces they're in (the mirrors and the haunted mordred manor) and put riz and the bad kids there only when they need to confront stuff. riz is meaningfully narratively away from baron's unknown land for most of fantasy high.

with that and all of my disclaimers in mind my conclusion here is if canon baron wants to be a Horror Monster they'd have to cross way more lines. be a Lot more invasive. hence (holds up my class swap baron like a long cat)

[mildmayfoxe]

it’s literally so important to make friends with your servers and bartenders anywhere you go as much as possible 🙏🏻 not only will it make both your day and their day better but sometimes they will give you free shots and sometimes they will start telling you gossip about their job and other diners and sometimes they will comp your fries

[sparrow-ceiling]

writing is so fun because i can fulfill my wildest fantasies like not having hearing problems

[onepokerhen]

the 00s may have been the dark age for cartoons but i will not lie its so fascinating to watch people go from analog to digital in real time. its so messy. everyone is baby learning how to walk again.

and its something that will never happen again most likely since we're so accustomed to digital now.

[bedlamsbard]

I totally understand your rage quitting now, although it's exactly the opposite for me! I was *very* into the Asgardian storyline in MCU and I hated Ragnarok with a passion - and the fandom sure made certain I knew everybody who didn't like the movie was an Idiot. Then IW and EG happened and killed all my joy for the MCU. I kinda sorta look at it without flinching nowadays, but it took somewhere around 5 years...

I think I know more people who went MCU --> Star Wars than the other way around! Weird couple of years for both fandoms. I'm a little bit of a weird outlier because I got back into Marvel well after Endgame, but a lot of what people criticize about the MCU is what I find interesting (the puzzle piece aspect). I am well aware that if I'd been consistently in Marvel since 2014 (which is when I drifted off) I'd probably have had the same rage reaction as like...everyone else I know.

I guess it's been a minute and my SW history isn't common knowledge to people who weren't around here between 2013-2021, so the lingering fury is probably confusing to people who only know me from the MCU. I was big into Star Wars from 2013-2021, from 2013-2015 on the PT/TCW side, then from 2014-2021 on the Rebels side (there's crossover), though I was also familiar with...everything. I have forgotten more about Star Wars than your average SW fan has ever known. (I was also in and out from 2007-2013, which is when some of my earlier fic like Oxygen and Rust dates from, but this is a period of time when my big fandom was actually Narnia) I'm quote-unquote "known" for Wake the Storm and Queen's Gambit in the PT/TCW, which have very consistently garnered negative responses since Wake started in 2013, and On the Edge of the Devil's Backbone in Rebels; I also used to do liveblogs of TCW and Rebels and the comics, for a while, so some of those posts are still floating around. I had a very, very bad breakup with a close fandom friend in 2016. I bounced off the ST, had an extremely negative reaction to Rebels S4 (to this day I have refused to do a full reaction post because I hated it so much I can't think about it coherently, and there were years where I couldn't think about it without spiraling), was okay with Resistance, R1, and Solo, hated Mando, hated TCW S7, hated the comics, hated the High Republic, and was still grimly hanging onto the fandom in utter misery in 2021 when the combination of hating TBB's sheer mediocrity (and the way they retconned Rebels) and the first episode of Loki hitting all of my favorite tropes like a fucking train finally knocked me out of Star Wars, to the extreme relief of everyone who knew me.

to this day I have fannish friends (who I met through Star Wars!) ready to stage an intervention if I ever seem even vaguely interested in getting back into Star Wars. I am the only person I know who looked at the Marvel fandom post-Endgame (and the Loki subfandom at any point in time, but especially while the show was airing) and went "this seems like a nice soothing place to immigrate to!" and honestly it is, people aren't as crazy anymore as they were around CW and Endgame. (Except in the Loki subfandom, which has made even me go "hmm. that's a bit much," but then I remember the egg genocide and you guys are fine, actually.)

very amusingly I actually speed-ran the Rebels experience with the Loki show -- really liked the first half, really disliked the second half -- but by that point I'd already gotten back into the rest of the MCU. I hadn't had a dramatic MCU breakup at all; I'd kept up with the films from 2008-2014 (CATWS was the last one I saw in order), but I just hadn't gotten around to seeing more than three odd ones out between 2014 and 2021 (Ragnarok, Captain Marvel, Ant-Man and the Wasp, and then I saw WandaVision early in 2021). I fandom osmosed some weird stuff that turned out not to be true.

anyway for those that don't know, that's the short version of my sordid Star Wars history! also sorry, you didn't actually, uh, ask for this.

[aria0fgold]

Just had another crazy dream in the month of February, but this time it had a rude awakening cuz it was semi-nightmare.

So like, I took a nap, and then I had a dream where I was looking at the monitor and it was like a footage of sorts where someone was showing me my HSR account. It was on the shop and it was like an ad about how all the prices are cut so low I can basically afford all of it. And while cycling through the shop items a little Dr. Ratio sitting on top of one of the top-up things appeared and so I immediately found out it was a dream.

So I had a small lucid dream-like experience and I knew it was fake so I focused on the numbers my jades had cuz I thought it'd be nice to remember the numbers of it, it was 98,3892 (Yeah, the comma is placed like that which is another dream detail, so basically I had 983, 892 jades. Oh how I wish that was true in reality too...)

But then all of sudden, the voice suddenly spoke low and said: But if you think I'm lying... WAKE UP (it grew distorted at that part).

And I did! I was basically pulled away from the dream but Not Fully Awake yet. My body wouldn't move. My eyes were sealed shut so tightly and it was dark and my dream just terrified me and I was beginning to panic. Tried to call my mom but no sound came out at all. And then I was like: Wait, panicking won't help at all, I need to calm down. So I took deep breaths then basically forcefully opened my eyes and I could finally move again.

[piglii]

I think the reason most video game to movie adaptations (and book adaptations, too) suck is that most people in charge of making movies just do not give a shit about video games as a medium and literally see it as a 1:1 conversion of money. like, “hey that hot new mario or zelda game came out this year and made $800 million dollars! if we make that into a movie, surely it will make the same amount or even more!” because most literally just see other forms of media as crude oil waiting to be made into gas. like it’s crazy to me that it seems really hard to understand the appeal in engaging with a piece of media personally yourself (or like with friends in multiplayer) as opposed to just watching it play out on a screen.

[fireleafwa]

@astrangerfromastrangeland here they are!! congee and focaccia, both are random recipes i nabbed from online a little while ago ( alexandracooks and nytimes ) and simplified for myself

You should be starting a recipe book. I don't give a shit if you're only 20-years-old. The modern web is rotting away bit by bit before our very eyes. You have no idea when that indie mom blog is going down or when Pinterest will remove that recipe. Copy it down in a notebook, physically or digitally. Save it somewhere only you can remove it. Trust me, looking for a recipe only to find out it's been wiped off the internet is so fucking sad. I've learned my lesson one too many times.

[abimee]

also i tried giving replicant a chance but i really cant fathom how this game is the more popular version the models looks like garbage the lighting and color grading of the enviroments are now wack and ugly and dare i say everyone looks inhuman compared to the life thats in the og. like i feel like ppl who like replicant are saying that out of a place of not knowing how much better gestalt is because man this game looks like horseshit

[alectepohe]

on a different note, i've been reading manga lately (as I discovered i can borrow it through the library) and the artwork is so good and makes for great references. i want to learn how to draw fabric so it looks more ~flowy~ and natural and i also want to learn more about facial expressions and drawing hair and manga is super helpful with that.

[tofixtheshadows]

I've been thinking a lot lately about how Kabru deprives himself.

Kabru as a character is intertwined with the idea that sometimes we have to sacrifice the needs of the few for the good of the many. He ultimately subverts this first by sabotaging the Canaries and then by letting Laios go, but in practice he's already been living a life of self-sacrifice.

Saving people, and learning the secrets of the dungeons to seal them, are what's important. Not his own comforts. Not his own desires. He forces them down until he doesn't know they're there, until one of them has to come spilling out during the confession in chapter 76.

Specifically, I think it's very significant, in a story about food and all that it entails, that Kabru is rarely shown eating. He's the deuteragonist of Dungeon Meshi, the cooking manga, but while meals are the anchoring points of Laios's journey, given loving focus, for Kabru, they're ... not.

I'm sure he eats during dungeon expeditions, in the routine way that adventurers must when they sit down to camp. But on the surface, you get the idea that Kabru spends most of his time doing his self-assigned dungeon-related tasks: meeting with people, studying them, putting together that evidence board, researching the dungeon, god knows what else. Feeding himself is secondary.

He's introduced during a meal, eating at a restaurant, just to set up the contrast between his party and Laios's. And it's the last normal meal we see him eating until the communal ending feast (if you consider Falin's dragon parts normal).

First, we get this:

Kabru's response here is such a non-answer, it strongly implies to me that he wasn't thinking about it until Rin brought it up. That he might not even be feeling the hunger signals that he logically knew he should.

They sit down to eat, but Kabru is never drawn reaching for food or eating it like the rest of his party. He only drinks.

It's possible this means nothing, that we can just assume he's putting food in his mouth off-panel, but again, this entire manga is about food. Cooking it, eating it, appreciating it, taking pleasure in it, grounding yourself in the necessary routine of it and affirming your right to live by consuming it. It's given such a huge focus.

We don't see him eat again until the harpy egg.

What a significant question for the protagonist to ask his foil in this story about eating! Aren't you hungry? Aren't you, Kabru?

He was revived only minutes ago after a violent encounter. And then he chokes down food that causes him further harm by triggering him, all because he's so determined to stay in Laios's good graces.

In his flashback, we see Milsiril trying to spoon-feed young Kabru cake that we know he doesn't like. He doesn't want to eat: he wants to be training.

Then with Mithrun, we see him eating the least-monstery monster food he can get his hands on, for the sake of survival- walking mushroom, barometz, an egg. The barometz is his first chance to make something like an a real meal, and he actually seems excited about it because he wants to replicate a lamb dish his mother used to make him!

...but he doesn't get to enjoy it like he wanted to.

Then, when all the Canaries are eating field rations ... Kabru still isn't shown eating. He's only shown giving food to Mithrun.

And of course the next time he eats is the bavarois, which for his sake is at least plant based ... but he still has to use a coping mechanism to get through it.

I don't think Kabru does this all on purpose. I think Kui does this all on purpose. Kabru's Post Traumatic Stress Disorder should be understood as informing his character just as much as Laios's autism informs his. It's another way that Kabru and Laios act as foils: where Laios takes pleasure in meals and approaches food with the excitement of discovery, Kabru's experiences with eating are tainted by his trauma. Laios indulges; Kabru denies himself. Laios is shown enjoying food, Kabru is shown struggling with it.

And I can very easily imagine a reason why Kabru might have a subconscious aversion towards eating.

Meals are the privilege of the living.

[cherishedpartners]

people who havent seen the northern lights cannot understand how powerful it is to see. like me and my family were sat at two in the morning, on the steps to the sea, just. looking up. at some point i started crying because oh my god its fucking beautiful

[edwardshundredyearoldspunk]

call me a boomer sympathizer but I do think a tiny bit of the experience is lost when streaming albums that were originally released as 12 inch LPs. something about the act of interruption, something about the two act structure being lost in the translation to digital/CD. it's harder to notice and appreciate the build up that is unique to so many older albums when you don't have to physically interact with the record to get to the other side

[graveyardmouth]

i cracked the fucking code dude. chicken + cheese + lettuce + tomato + mustard + mayonnaise. beautifulest sandwich ever. i ate it in like 5 minutes