#what is the real orthographe

[max1461]

How is the statement that "English is kind of a Frankenstein language, it's a mix between German, French, and Latin!" wrong? I get it’s phrased in a misguided way: English and German supposedly both came from Proto-Germanic rather than German being in the “mix ”, the French influence being more lexical items and orthographic conventions than grammatical patterns etc. Is it that the statement ignores the way other languages have been influenced by surrounding languages?

sorry if this comes off as rude, I don’t know much about language

It's not just phrased in a misguided way, it's totally incorrect! You're right that the real truth is that English and German share a common ancestor, Proto-Germanic. This is very different than English being a "mix of German and [anything]". Indeed, there are many languages descended from Proto-Germanic, including Swedish and Icelandic and Dutch. Descent from Proto-Germanic is what defines the Germanic language family. You could just as well say "English is a mix of Swedish and [whatever]", but that would also be false.

Beyond that, all (or most) languages probably share a common ancestor somewhere deep in prehistory, it's just that we can't confidently trace things that far. English probably shares a common ancestor with Chinese at some time depth; this does not make English a "mix of Chinese and [whatever]".

The other reason this is inaccurate it that, yes, it's true that English has borrowed a lot of words from French, and a lesser but still substantial number from Greek and Latin. But calling English a "Frankenstein language" obscures the fact that significant areal influence (influence from other languages) like this is a part of most languages' histories, it's perfectly ordinary. There's nothing to be remarked upon regarding English specifically.

[cenittxnadir]

Logan Howlett Canons

I'm trying to make a list of all the canons I know and I have seen on the comics and authors notes about him. This list has the purpose of giving some ideas for your fanfics, works and your own headcanos. I really just like to ramble about my favorite characters and share what I know :). Maybe I'll do one for Kurt. You know the drill; English is not my first language so they might be some orthographic errors

Logan had two half brothers: Dog Logan and Jhon Jr Howlett -who died quite young-

His real father's name is Thomas Logan (her mom had an affair with him while she was married to John Howlett.)

Logan´s relationship with her mother wasn't the best. He was usually neglected by her, but his dad (John) used to love him very much.

Logan had two best friends as a child: Dog Logan and Rose O'Hara (Theres no info if she's related to Miguel O'Hara. Although she was Irish as well. She was Logan's first love, unfortunately he killed her by accident, and yes, Jean resembles a lot to her, that's why Logan felt attracted to her.

In the comics, Logan got the name Wolverine as a nickname from his workmates when he worked in mine, referring to his animalistic way of work. In the movies he got the name from the legend of Kuekuatsheu.

Logan spent a while leaving with a pack of wolves, part of his mutation allows him to communicate with animals in a basic level

Logan has superhumanly acute sense, like the five of them, his skin is more sensible as well as he tastes (Use this information with caution) he can see in the dark with no problem and can get sensory overloaded pretty easily

In the movies, Logan smokes a lot because this helps him to disguise some smells that for him can be overwhelming. In Logan due to his age and loss of his mutation he doesn't smoke that much because strong smells are not a problem anymore

Against the common belief, Logan its quite intelligent, he's a weapons and computer expert

Believe it or not, he is a skilled pilot and a vehicle expert, he can drive pretty much everything and is good at vehicle repair

He had trained Black widow, Rogue, Storm, Nightcrawler, Colossus, Sunspot, Jubilee, Shadowcat and among other in hand-to-hand combat.

Logan is a polyglot. He speaks: English, Japanese, Russian, Mandarin, Cheyenne, Korean, Lakota, Spanish, and Krakoan.

Logan's blood type is O-

Wolverine carries a medical card stating that he is a war veteran who has a metal plate in the head, to help him bypass metal detectors in airports

Logan has used the E-Mail address 'snikt1@xaviers.com' (Love him so much) Also, Deadpool has claimed to have hacked Wolverine's Tumblr account (He knows about us, he is among us, probably he runs a fanfic account, who knows)

Logan have claimed that his biggest and greatest love is beer

Logan burns a lot of calories while healing so needs constant fuel. (He has a big stomach)

Logan had a bunch of biological kids, but the ones that stand out more are Laura, Gabriela (she is Laura's direct younger sister/clone, I love her so much and they like to hang out a lot with Wade) and Daken. They are comics of them together

[maniculum]

Bestiaryposting Results: Dikebael

This animal's name is, admittedly, a bit of a "Tirion upon Túna (upon Rye)" situation in that I did not process that there was anything unusual about the name until, shortly after the entry went up, it got a "heh. Dick-ball" reply. (And they weren't alone; at least one of the art posts that's gone up has acknowledged the unfortunate name.) It probably doesn't help that this entry references the animal's testicles.

I can't even go, "well, it's not pronounced like that," because by the orthographical rules of the conlang I used to generate these names, it would be pronounced /dɪ·kɛ·bæ·ɛl/, so the start still pretty much sounds like "dick". I'd say I'll be more careful about that in future, but I scheduled all of these ahead of time and I'm not sure it's worth digging through the queue, so we'll just have to see.

Anyway, for anyone who's not sure what this whole "bestiaryposting" thing is, you can find an explanation and previous posts here: https://maniculum.tumblr.com/bestiaryposting. The entry that people are working from this time is here:

(Also, I just want to remind anyone reading that you're free to join in -- this is not a closed thing, just check out the "maniculum bestiaryposting" tag and sort by latest to see what the current beast is. Felt I should say that since we've had the same group of people for a while and I don't want anyone seeing the same set of usernames each time and thinking this is an exclusive club.)

Anyway, art below the cut in roughly chronological order.

@sweetlyfez (link to post here), acknowledging the lack of physical description in the entry, has opted to just have fun with it and put together this strange chimerical creature. I think the flat little horns on top of its snout are really interesting -- the linked post describes them as functioning like a stone circle to make sure it has the right date for its annual announcements. I have no idea if that would work at all, but it seems like it fits the general logic of the bestiary, and I like it.

@silverhart-makes-art (link to post here) has an interesting explanation in the linked post about how they decided to combine features of various desert-dwelling animals with the basic body plan of a peccary (which is apparently the same animal I know as a "javelina" -- I learn a lot looking stuff up while I write these posts). They then acknowledge that, without the context of all the things they're working in here, it kind of just looks like they've drawn a very large warthog. It's a very good hog, though. Something neat that you might miss if you're just looking at the drawing without the context of the post, for instance, is that it has the same fat-storing tail as a fat-tailed sheep. For more little bonuses like that, check out the linked post.

@cheapsweets (link to post here) has given us a whole herd of critters here. They've also hooked onto the "desert" thing due to the lack of physical description, collected traits from real-world animals that make them successful in a desert biome, and combined them into a new creature. They make me think of jackals, which aren't mentioned in the linked post, and also make me think of donkeys, which (kind of) are. Let's all take a moment to note the baby hiding behind a pile of rocks to the right, watching a smaller animal of some sort. I think it's cute.

CheapSweets also wonders about the significance of March 25th, and I have to say so do I. It's not explained in the text. The symbolism bit does say they call the same number of times during the day and night to represent the devil wanting to make day and night the same, which... what?

@pomrania (link to post here) clarifies that this is a grayscale rendering and that the animal would actually be a sort of dusty tan in a color version. They also went the direction of "this animal lives in the desert, so let's focus on desert adaptations." So we've got the split hooves and nostrils that can close to keep out sand. I particularly like the overhanging lip; it adds a certain charm, I think.

@coolest-capybara (link to post here) has decided that this is an excellent excuse to draw an elephant, since we're short on specific description beyond them living in Africa and being able to make loud noises. As a bonus, this means that the young Dikebael can be conveniently hidden behind the mother's large ears. The other aspects of this illustration relate to Coolest-Capybara having a pretty solid theory as to "why March 25th" -- apparently that's the Feast of the Annunciation, which of course the medieval author would have known. So here we have the Archelephant Gabriel trumpeting at Mary. (Actually it seems like the baby is doing the trumpeting, and it looks adorable doing it.) The linked post describes the medieval artworks that are being referenced in the illustration, so I recommend checking that out.

Anyway, time to check the Aberdeen Bestiary...

... well, we can't, actually. The Aberdeen Bestiary is missing a few folios, and this is on one of those. I got the text from MS Bodley 764, since I have a print translation of that one and it's fairly similar. For the illumination, we're going to go to the digitized Ashmole Bestiary, which is even more similar but I don't have a translation of it.

So this is the onager or wild ass.

Interestingly, it looks pretty much identical to the image of the tame ass on the same page, but to be fair, I don't think I'd be able to distinguish between an onager and a donkey with any reliability. Makes one wonder why they have separate illustrations, though.

And yeah, I have no additional explanation for why... any of the stuff in the entry.

[dedalvs]

Hi!

Just came to ask on an issue I've ran into regarding neography.

People in my circle of conlangers/worldbuilders/neographists say that what I do isn't right and is not to be considered neography - here's what I did:

I made over 500 neographies made since the creation of my Reddit account last year, all documented on @thecrazyneographist

And while some of them are seen as cool and all, most are trash bullshit I throw at the wall waiting for something to stick. I literally have diamonds laying under heaps of crap.

I love neographying, this is out of question. But I, despite making a couple WIPs, cannot make a conlang for every script aesthetic I come up with, thus, 90% of my works are just English ciphers (and a devastating part of them are alphabets).

Question:

Am I a valid neographist if most of my creations are nothing more than "children-level ciphers" for English, or not? No matter the answer I will continue making them because that's what I like to do.

Thanks in advance.

Hey, sorry I didn't respond to this sooner, but there are a lot of issues in here, and I wanted to tease them apart, so I can be quite clear on each one.

First, "I am a valid x", where x refers to some sort of artist, is always kind of a sad question to me, because those who ask it are undoubtedly asking it as a result of one kind of gatekeeping or another. For example, fanfic authors who ask "Am I real writer?" are undoubtedly asking it because someone (or several someones) have told them that they're not because all they write is fanfic. There are often a set of assumptions that come with the definition of a given art, such that the belief is if you haven't fulfilled certain criteria, you can't claim to be an artist in that field. For me, I think the definition is rather simpler.

In any artistic field, you qualify as that type of artist if you attempt that type of art. Notice I didn't say finish. This is especially clear for conlangs, as no conlang is finished. If the criteria for being a conlanger is having one finished conlang then there are no conlangers, and there never have been. There's no such thing as a finished conlang. There is such a thing as a finished painting, though, but I don't think you have to have finished a painting to be a painter. You need to be working at, but you don't need to have finished anything.

This doesn't mean that anyone is an anything. For example, to be a novelist, you have to be in the process of writing at least one novel. If all you've ever written is short stories, you're not a novelist. You are a writer, though.

For a neographer (or orthographer or conscriptor or whatever term is in vogue), all you have to do is attempt to create one conscript. That is the only criterion that needs to be satisfied. You've done that in spades, so you are a valid neographer.

Now, when it comes to an invented script, there are a number of elements involved—or that may be involved. They are as follows:

A unique set of glyphs (i.e. letterforms that are crucially different from any other glyphs in any other script—at least partially).

A unique flow (i.e how the glyphs look when lined up to make wordforms).

A specific instantiation or presentation (e.g. the Roman script has a unique set of glyphs and a unique flow, but in presenting a script, Copperlate looks different from Arial, Times, Palatino, Verdana, etc. Each one is a specific presentation or font face or style).

A unique assignment to a set of sounds and/or words/concepts.

Each of these involve artistic decisions, and they all can be assigned different levels of importance/interest. The fourth bullet above seems to be where unhelpful people in your circle are complaining. That is, one thing to do with a script is assign it to, say, the English version of the Roman alphabet. This is a cipher. Here's an example that's used on the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland:

Let's evaluate this based on the criteria above:

There are a unique set of glyphs—kind of. However, if you kind of stand back and evaluate, you'll see that in fact, every letter is a stylized variant of a letter in the Roman alphabet—with, perhaps, the slight exception of I, which looks like a stylized eye (because this is for Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Forbidden Eye. It's a theme). So, actually, it's not super unique. Additionally, making each vowel glyph red is rather silly.

When written together, the script has a unique flow, but that flow is actually pretty poor. It's a bit like writing in all caps in English, but even all caps Roman has a better balance than this script. It's honestly kind of tiresome looking at this script on the wall. For an alphabet, the characters aren't distinct enough, so it gets poor marks there.

The style of the swooshes/wedges/talons is nice, for the most part (I and U cause me to raise an eyebrow—O, too). The distinction between the very short wedges (as in A, B, and N) and the dots (as in J, L, and M), and the few characters with an even smaller dot (E, X, S, and Y) is, frankly, baffling. Additionally, sometimes the wedges are balanced nicely (A and N are great examples), and sometimes they're way too close (cf. B and Z). While the line work is clean, this honestly even the best version of this style of this script, which is unfortunate, to say the least.

This is a straight-up English cipher. That can only be evaluated based on the goals of the script designer. If the script creator is doing it for fun, then there's nothing to say. That's their choice. If this were done for an Indiana Jones movie or television show, I'd cry foul (cf. Star Wars and their incredibly lazy work). However, this is for a ride. The intended level of interaction for this script is for fans who are standing in line anywhere from 15 minutes to two hours, depending on the time of year and time of day. There are actual messages written in this writing system that fans are supposed to decode. Given the time allotted, I think a cipher—and, in fact, a cipher that can be somewhat easily deciphered—was the right way to go. It's either do a cipher so park goers can actually read the messages without working at it beforehand and have some fun as they're waiting in line, or go all-out stylewise with the expectation that NO rider will ever figure out what's been written.

That's how a script needs to be evaluated. Sometimes purpose overrides style; sometimes not. It totally depends.

It SHOULD go without saying that if you're doing this for your own purposes, then no one can say shit about its intended purpose, or lack thereof. I always thought that in fora like r/neography posters share their script for the look of it, unless they say otherwise. There's both positives and negatives to that. Sometimes the way a script is used makes it cool, so presented without that background renders the script a bit less interesting, but other times, as with your scripts, it should be rather freeing. That is, it doesn't matter if the script is a cipher, is for a conlang, or is asemic: The question is, does it look good? If it does, it shouldn't matter what the hell it's for.

I've looked at your scriptwork here, and I've also seen it on r/neography before. Yes, some of it's a little sloppy, some of it's a little basic (i.e. variation on a theme without thought to how the system as a whole hangs together), and the presentation of some of it could use polishing, but a lot of it is quite interesting, quite striking, and presented quite well. Given the volume of work you've done, it's not surprising that some of it isn't as interesting, but by percentage, your work, on the whole, is outstanding. I honestly never noticed they were ciphers because it's, frankly, totally irrelevant. It'd be like going to an art exhibition and complaining that the titles of all the paintings start with the letter s. lol Like who gives af. That level of criticism is uncalled for and plain silly. Unless someone posts and says, "What do you think about this writing system that I created for a conlang?", I don't see the relevance of commenting on how the script ties to a phonology.

I would also like to take a moment to comment specifically on r/neography. I've frequented there for some time now, and I've seen a lot of good work, but the percentage of good work to bad work (or even relevant work) is extremely low. This is why I say so:

My biggest complaint is there are a metric ton of posts that are Romanization systems or Cyrillicization systems or the like. There is absolutely nothing ne about that ography. I joined that subreddit to see some NEW scripts, not already existing ones assigned to some phonology. There can be interesting discussions about that, sure, and I'm happy to see those types of discussions if I go to a forum specifically for those discussions. A place that purports to be about creating new scripts is not that place—period. If I were a mod, I would ban all of those posts as wholly irrelevant—and yet it is the majority of posts there on any given day.

The presentation of scripts is often abysmal. I mean ABYSMAL. For example, take an English-speaking preschooler writing their name. That's an example of the Roman script. Now imagine presenting that—and only that—as an example of the Roman script, which the viewer has never seen before. What would you say about that? I mean, it looks like garbage. You can't evaluate a writing system if it looks like it's written with one's offhand on a crowded train. And yet that is precisely the type of work that is OFTEN presented there. How can anyone expect to have their script evaluated if the way they present it makes it look like someone tried to handwrite "happy birthday" on a card but started too close to the edge? It's embarrassing—or should be, anyway. I couldn't imagine presenting my own work like that to anyone for critique or showcasing.

The scriptwork itself is often poor. Honestly, there's nothing much to say about this. I rarely comment there, because sometimes the most helpful comment I can think of is, "Maybe creating conscripts isn't for you", which is not a comment worth sharing. Part of it is talent, but part of it is patience and knowing (a) what makes a good glyph, and (b) what makes a good flow for your glyphs. A lot of it is subjective, but "subjective" means that there will be some scripts that 90% of viewers will think is subjectively good; some that 60% will think is "good"; some 20%... So even though it's subjective, it doesn't mean that every single script is equal. There's a lot of room for improvement.

Because of the above, the kind of feedback you get at a place like r/neography is, frankly, suspect, and often not worth the effort it took to type. For my own stuff, I respect the opinions of people whose work I respect. If I don't respect someone's script work, their criticism is worthless. For your own work, I'd recommend you adopt a similar approach.

Finally, I'd like to applaud you for the very last thing you wrote—that you were set to continue whatever I wrote. Because if you enjoy it, you should keep at it. There's no other reason to do it.

Thanks for the ask, and keep it up!

[nada1124]

I am not a native English speaker so there may be some orthographic errors. : : : : : : : : I was recently reading various billy batson fanfics as well as reading about him on tumblr and I thought, in various fanfics, bruce thinks captain marvel/shazam is CC Batson, and while I like the idea, I was thinking about how billy's champion form is created, ie what are they basing it on, him as an adult or how and I thought ght. : : : if it was so idealizes how he is a hero then I came up with the idea of : : : Billy Batson from the Original Comics- champion shape hair shape nose and mouth from his father and eye and ear color from his mother, and "build" of superman (osea muscular and stuff). : : : Billy Batson- from the Vazquez family (based on the movie)- first champion form- "structure" of superman but hair color eyes type of nose mouth and ears of his mother but more masculine, and when he discovers that she never looked for him and decides to go for his real family he changes to an appearance combining Rosa and Victor but with several characteristics of himself and that each champion form of his brothers are similar as if they were blood brothers that is to say with similar characteristics but keeping some of his own.

[lia404]

Which ship name for Ryoken/Revolver?

Tl;dr: Moiraishipping

OR if we really, really want to make the differentiation: Athenshipping for Ryoken/Revolver and Moiraishipping for Ryoken/Revolver 1.0/Revolver 2.0.

The actual logic beneath the cut. Time to sit down in your favourite chair with a nice cup of tea, because you’re here for a while. Of course you are, it’s a post about Revolver.

It’s all his fault. It’s always all his fault.

First: please believe me when I say that this post was meant to be short. Like really, the premise was simple: selfcest is one of my fave tropes (those who know me since my Persona era are well aware) and Vrains frankly is a goldmine for selfcest. I was elated when I found out that Emissaryshipping was a thing (albeit a rather niche one) and I was less than impressed when I discovered that in its 7 years of existence, the Vrains fandom had never coined a ship name for Revolver selfcest.

This, obviously, had to be solved at once. Which is why I brainstormed for a full week and then it took me 10 days to write this post, because I fell into a terrifying rabbit hole. And now you get to read all about it!

First approach — the obvious

My very first step was to discard the obvious:

Fateshipping is already taken in the fandom, even if in a different series (Yami Yugi/Rafael in DM. Niche, but still already coined.) We don’t want confusion.

Bulletshipping won't work either, for the same reason. (Judai Yuki/Taniya in GX.) I am also willingly ignoring the possibility of Varretshipping, since Varret is clearly meant to be Bullet in katakana, and not everyone is aligned on this orthograph.

Rokketshipping, going with the English names of Revolver's cards, could have been interesting, but it is too close to Rocketshipping, the ship name for Jessie/James of the Team Rocket. While from another fandom, the ship is prominent enough for me to be wary of mistagging.

Gunshipping is not an option, because Pistolshipping already exists in the same fandom (Blood Shepherd/Revolver) and while the words are different, it still feels very confusing.

Barrelshipping is also a no, because, seriously. In Yu-gi-oh logic, it sounds like Bandit Keith/Revolver. In real world logic, it just makes it sound like Ryoken is about to put kegs of rum in a boat. An interesting idea, but not what we’re after now. (Note that I am also ignoring Borrelshipping, for the same reason I did Varretshipping.)

Prisonershipping is… well, it’s unclear if it’s taken (I’ve found it listed for Rin/Ruri in Arc-V, but in only one occurrence.) But I also didn’t vibe much with it: words have a meaning, I would like my ship to be defined by more than just the doom of “prisoner”. Aaaaand this is what happens when you ask a linguist to name things.

With all of these names marked as unsatisfying, I decided to move to more metaphorical names, and took the direction of mythological references. After all, between Ignis and Pandor (and probably others that don’t come to mind right now), Revolver thrives on them (and so do I, which is great, because I’m totally and shamelessly indulging myself.)

Second approach — mythology, part 1: words

Once the mythological theme was decided, my first intuition was to look into a famous figure whose words carried an impact. 

My logic was that while Revolver is powerful in many ways, his words are one of his greatest powers. They are life-changing. After all, when he was 8, his words gave Yusaku the strength to survive his ordeal and beyond. When he picked up the phone and spoke up, his words saved six children and doomed his father. Even this early, his words had the power to bring life or destroy it. 

Ryoken doesn’t speak that much: his few words are meant to have a lot of meaning. (I also headcanon him as a rather quiet child, who has learnt to make his words count.) 

Revolver speaks more, and uses his words as orders or as weapons, speaking or shouting menaces, aiming at bringing despair (or at least a good reality-check.)

And let us not forget that it’s Revolver’s words that kickstart the series! 

"Begone, Cyberse!" (Yes I am resigned to my fate of being That Person Who Only Uses Screencaps In French In Her Meta Posts, because apparently we don’t have any English sub in good quality available in this country.)

Of course, no matter whether it’s Ryoken or Revolver talking (even if they do sound different), there’s also the obvious “his voice would lure the hardest of hearts into the sweetest of traps”, because, damn, that voice could speak any word. I’d listen to an ASMR recording of Revolver reading the phonebook out loud any time.

But what he chooses to say does play an incredible part.

So, words.  Mythology and powerful words, spoken out loud. 

While there’s a lot that could match, I was looking for “accidental impact” and “could be deadly”, because it seemed to me that it was what worked best for Ryoken. Cassandra came to mind first, cursed to know the future but to be unable to share it because no one believed her words. But while indeed focused on the importance of words, her legend doesn’t fit the bill exactly: Ryoken is kind of the opposite, actually. People believe him, very much (arguably, too much.) Cassandrashipping is out.

Even so, the idea of the oracles, or sybils, stuck with me: after all, they “know” the future, and share words that could bring tales of life or death (but usually brought disaster.) 

I confess a certain fondness for the Pythia, the Oracle of Delphi. Her name comes from a legendary snake, which is close enough to a dragon to satisfy me, and she was sort of a big deal with her predictions (see also: Oedipus.) While still not exactly fitting the bill, Pythiashipping or Sybilshipping were strong contenders. They sounded nice and Ryoken is really good at making his own prophecies and getting caught into a fate he builds for himself.

A typo in Pythia also brought up the (completely unrelated) idea of Pity, which amused me. This boy has a lot of self-pity. Pityshipping had potential, because it is a non-insignificant part of his relationship with himself (which is what I wanted to define after all.) I seriously considered it, but I was reluctant, and discarded it for the same reason I did for Prisonershipping. Let’s not encourage him.

Third approach — mythology, part 2: appearance (and more)

Even if I felt like I was onto something with my Pythia, I was not entirely satisfied. I thus decided to take a different path, the physical aspect. 

Revolver has yellow eyes, and Ryoken has white hair. What happens when you mash both attributes?

Don’t tell me you don’t see the resemblance.

After such a deep-dive into mythology, I would have been overjoyed to be able to say “NEVERMIND THE DEPTHS, I COMBINE HIS AVATAR’S EYES WITH HIS REAL LIFE’S HAIR AND TA-DAAAA! OWLSHIPPING!”

Except… Owlshipping was already taken. Of course it was. (From Arc-V: Dennis Macfield/Noboru Gongenzaka/Shun Kurosaki.)

Let it be known that I really tried to make things more simple, but no easy silly name for me apparently. So back to mythology I went, following a very logical stream of ideas, I promise. 

After all, there is one mythological figure that is strongly associated with owls.

Athena.

Athena is fascinating; she has so many facets she could be the goddess of disco.

Here are a few things about Athena that are interesting to focus on, in our specific case:

Athena is the daughter of Zeus, God of Lightning (!) notorious for doing whatever pleases him, creating a mess and leaving without any accountability while others have to clean after him/deal with consequences of his actions/end up punished for something they didn’t do. Zeus, you asshole. Kinda reminds me of someone.

Athena is the daughter of Metis, Deity of Wisdom, an Oceanid, a sea nymph, which is nice, considering how important the ocean is to our Topic of Interest. Her husband, Zeus, ever the lovely character, ate Metis after being told she’d give him a child more powerful than him. From the inside of her husband’s stomach, Metis still took care of the child she was pregnant with, then armed her so she could poke her way out from her father’s head. This means that Athena is born from the inside of Zeus’s head, as if an idea coming from him, but also a great source of suffering for him. I like to draw parallels, and I’ll even go so far as saying that while Athena was raised by her mother the goddess of Wisdom (and thus becoming wise too), Ryoken’s mother is out of the picture, so there was no one to give him wisdom. …Sorry Ryoken.

Athena gave life to the first human woman, Pandora (although she didn’t forge her; Hephaïstos did.)

Athena is one of the most revered, adored, respected Greek goddesses, one of the deities with most followers. I mean, they built the Parthenon in her name. That sort of means something.

Athena is a goddess of both war and knowledge, but most of all she is a goddess of protection of cities and society. She does it to assist her father, but also out of duty and attachment to certain cities.

Athena helps heroes, such as Perseus, Herakles, or Odysseus, for better or worse, sometimes (often) at the detriment of other people (including, but not only, her father.) 

Athena has a billion epithets, but the other name she’s most known by is Pallas, which means “to brandish a weapon.” 🔫 

While I am aware that, considering the richness of the myths, I probably would find ways to link Athena to absolutely any character I want, I like to think that there’s enough here to cover a good part of Ryoken’s multiple traits and the way they interact.

At that depth of my rabbit hole, I was ready to call it: Revolver/Ryoken was Athenashipping, or Athenshipping, or Pallasshipping (but not Minervashipping, because while I really love latin, it didn’t sound good.) A delightfully cryptic name that would have everyone struggle to know who was in it, and raise an eyebrow when finding out. Very faithful to the tradition of Yu-Gi-Oh ship names.

Ah yes, Revolver and his famous Light/Fairy deck.

However. (It can't be that easy!)

I still wasn’t satisfied. Because while Athena, her multiple names, myths and characteristics did tie together many aspects of Ryoken, it felt incomplete.

One thing was particularly missing: Ryoken’s guilt and commitment issues, which are a HUGE part of his relationship with himself.

As Greek gods tend to do, Athena doesn’t display a lot of guilt. She’s been known to grieve occasionally, although she seems to lack the weird habit that gods have to turn the person they more or less accidentally faulted into a plant. (That said, she did turn her favourite girl into an olive tree after she got killed by fellow athletes who were jealous because the Goddess liked her better. But that’s not relevant here. Or, I don’t think it is. I might be missing a parallel.)

Anyway.  Words and power and knowledge and adoration and multiple names were all good, but this ship needed more guilt and grief to work. 

Back to the mythology books we go. Again.

Fourth approach — mythology, part 3: where we try about everything and anything

I wanted guilt, so I looked up guilt. I found Aidos, goddess of Shame, daughter of Prometheus (remember, the dude who stole fire and gave it to humans?), whose counterpart and bff was Nemesis (goddess of rightful retribution. Sounds familiar).  That sounded really good at first, but in this case “shame” rather means “modesty”: in Latin, she's Pudicitia. I’m not exactly sure “modesty” applies to Ryoken.

I wanted grief, so I looked up grief.  Penthos came up, Greek spirit of Grief, whose parents are none other than Aether and Gaia, the air and earth literally. 

I discarded both, first because they were too mono-faced and lacked interactions with the other aspects of Ryoken’s personality, and second because I didn't know enough about them. (Third, I'm not a fan of the names Aidosshipping or Penthosshipping; they just don’t sound great, and can even create confusion in the case of Aidosshipping.)

In the process, I also considered then discarded Aletheia, goddess of truth (Veritas in latin). While Revolver very rarely tells open lies (the only one that comes to mind is when he says he doesn't know who Playmaker is. I think everything else is the truth, even if it's the truth only for him), this kid is still far from always speaking the truth.

While Aletheiashipping sounded nice in a very typical, needlessly complicated way, Aletheia means “unconcealment” and Ryoken is painfully concealed.  Pass.

See, I tried everything! And with that, I was about to really conclude that Athenshipping was the best ship name for Ryoken/Revolver.

UNLESS…

Final approach — Wait, there’s three!

You know, in retrospect, it feels a little obvious. At that point of my deep-dive, I remembered that while the ship Ryoken/Revolver was nice, why should I deprive myself of the joy of the ship Ryoken/Revolver 1.0 / Revolver 2.0?

And look, that was a pattern of three, there. Couldn’t I make it simple and call it Threeshipping? The name was not taken.

————————— INTERMISSION —————————

Maybe you already noticed, and then this intermission will seem silly. But in case you haven't noticed, and since I blew my own mind with this realisation, there's no reason I wouldn't blow yours in the process. Have you ever wondered why the number three, specifically?  It has likely nothing to do with mythology this time. 

However: - it's a convenient one in general, easy to reach and easy to remember. - it is, as Yusaku notices, the number of cards you can have in your main monster zone in Speed Duels. - but most of all, and that's where I had an "oh." moment: it's also, dun dun dunnn~

~the number of rods used in the problem of the Tower of Hanoi.  Coincidence? I think not.

(This intermission is actually an excuse to note that I didn’t go into Hanoishipping because that just sounds like Revolver/his whole organisation, and Knightshipping is already taken by a ship from Arc-V, Shingo Sawatari/Yuto. I didn't know how to fit it in the rest of my stupid narrative, bullet points wouldn't comply. Thank you for your patience.)

————————— END OF INTERMISSION —————————

So, threeshipping could work, in theory. But it didn’t sound… really good. It felt rather bland, honestly. I discarded it along with all the others and, since I was too deep at that point, I was unstoppable and turned back to mythology. Again again.

I kickstarted the brainstorming again with an easy question: which figure goes with the number THREE in mythology? 

The first that came to mind was Hecate, with her three heads, but I really couldn't find any link with Ryoken. I mean, she’s the daughter of the titan of destruction and the titaness of stars (although Hecate’s father might also be Zeus, which, well, isn’t it true for basically anyone in Greek mythology at this point), and she’s the goddess of protection, and borders, and the moon, and plenty of other things I don’t fully grasp because I should probably read more of the Theogony than just what I studied in class, but I’m not sure I’m THIS dedicated.

Anyway, let’s forget about Hecateshipping. Three faces don’t make a Ryoken.

And suddenly, I had a vision. An epiphany. A true “how am I so stupid I feel like bashing my head against the nearest wall” moment.

Because, you see, there is one famous figure linked with the number three in mythology. In multiple mythologies, even. And if you’re not me, you may have seen it coming about 2000 words ago (or maybe the tl;dr just clued you in.) There is one very, very, very famous mythological figure linked with the number three. Or rather, three mythological figures.  And they’re among my favourite myths of all times, so really, even the wall is too soft for my head.

I’m obviously talking about these lovely ladies.

The Greek Moirai. Also known as the Parcae in Latin, close to the Norns in Scandinavian mythology, or you know, in English, simply: the Fates.

Sometimes it’s so obvious you miss it!

And so, here I am now, chilling with my buddies Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos, discussing how they are perfect to define the relationship between Ryoken and himself-but-in-the-virtual-world and also himself-but-in-the-virtual-world-but-with-yellow-eyes.

It is unclear who their parents are (so many different myths), although Zeus could probably be the father again. But it doesn’t matter, because even Zeus doesn’t hold any power over them, which is frankly badass of them. What is clear is their functions: - Clotho spins the thread: she’s the source of the tapestry, triggering life. - Lachesis unwinds the thread and measures it, observing life with an absolute knowledge of everything that goes into the tapestry.  - Atropos cuts the thread: she brings the end, the destruction, not out of evilness but because it is where the end is meant to happen.

I have a feeling that Clotho would get along well with Revolver 2.0 and his creation of Pandor. Lachesis might have a few things to chat about with Ryoken, the younger one who watched children his age get tortured or the older one who or the older one who is now watching over the network. And if the thread has to be moved a little to make the tapestry better, no one has to know (even if one’s father dies in the process.) And finally, Atropos would probably take a liking to Revolver 1.0, who destroyed the Cyberse world and almost destroyed the network with the Tower of Hanoi because he had to, it was the best option to do so.

I doubt the Moirai feel guilt or grief, but as they encompass the entirety of human fate, they surely carry a lot of feelings. It’s good enough for me.

And thus, after this way too deep rabbit hole (that was more like an army of rabbits), I propose to you:

MOIRAISHIPPING.

(Parcaeshipping didn’t sound as good, and the Norns, while similar, are still different enough that Nornshipping wouldn’t convey the same meaning.)

Although, as mentioned in the tl;dr at the top of this post, we can also differentiate the ship Ryoken/Revolver and Ryoken/Revolver 1.0/Revolver 2.0, and thus keep Athenshipping for the first. Fun fact: Athena is also the goddess of weaving!

But to be honest, I do think it’s not necessary to make this differentiation, and Moiraishipping is enough.

I rest my case.

If you're wondering: yes, I completely used the excuse of ship names to write yet another analysis of this character. It’s like he never ceases to cause ink to flow. Damn you, Revolver. Seriously, with all the words he makes me write, I should have gone with something like Museshipping instead (IT IS NOT TAKEN. HOW DOES IT NOT EXIST YET. Quick, someone come up with a ship that can be named Museshipping.)

And I’ll conclude by: considering how cool his new Moirai friends are, I sure hope Ryoken will consider taking up weaving and tapestry soon, to keep himself occupied on his boat, between two cyber attacks.

Thoughts are welcome, and now it’s time to populate the tag in Tumblr and AO3!

————————— OMAKE —————————

Kudos to my partner for having the patience of a saint while I was brainstorming.

He came back to around 50 messages of stupid tentative ship names and increasing frustration, followed by the descent into mythology madness I described above. And he still agrees to live with me, HOW.

[ohbother2]

hi! so like, i might try writing smut soon enough (because why the hell not amirite?) so like, is there any advice you could give me? like DOs and DONTs, tools that could be useful to avoid orthographic errors etc etc (im used to using chat GPT to look at my horribly, horribly written texts and correct them, but i've got a feeling it will straight up censor it, and english's not my first language, so anything that would make my dirty dirty texts into dirty clean text would be dope)

Hi!

I'm sorry but because you're an ageless blog I'm not going to give actual smut-writing advice, but ig it's okay to give general writing advice?

Just a reminder to everyone, if you're a minor please do not interact with me or my posts!

In all honesty I don't really know what I even do when I write, the words just sort of appear and I'm like 'yep, that works', but that's not the most useful advice, lol

I envision the story I want to read, and then I write it how I want to read it. I hope that makes sense

I guess my main advice would be to find your own niche, like, are you a dialogue or an 'action' based writer? Ofc it's good to be good at both but people have their own strong suits. For me, for example, I'm much better at descriptive writing than dialogue so that's what I focus most of my writing around

People also have their own unique styles and formatting to their writing - I feel as though mine is pretty distinctive with certain types of vocabulary and paragraph spacing/grammar/etc - so I guess it would be good to find a style that works good for you! For example, don't stick to lengthy paragraphs of immense detail if that doesn't come naturally to you, etc

My absolute top priority when writing is to not tell the readers what's going on, but to show it. Sometimes 'They felt X/Y/Z' is a useful tool for emphasising a particular point, but sometimes it detracts from the writing overall.

As an example: 'He felt as if his heart was going to burst from his chest...' (This can be good when used in the right moments, but if that's the only descriptor the writing loses a bit of life to it)

Compared to: 'His heart hammered painfully against his taut ribs as he gasped uselessly for breath...' (This is showing rather than just simply telling, and is how I personally prefer to write a majority of the time)

It's also important not to repeat yourself unnecessarily - it can be good to repeat when you're really trying to emphasise a point, but sometimes writing can stagnate and become less engaging? It's very difficult to find the right balance but it makes a world of difference to a piece of text

For dialogue (arguably my weakest skill) the best piece of advice is that you cannot write accurately how people in real life talk. When we talk we mostly fill out thoughts with nonsense and fluff out the main point - you can't write this because the readers will become disengaged. There's an important balance to find between being too formal for speech, maintaining the main point of the conversation, and ensuring the characters still sound like themselves. I tend to really try and put myself in the characters heads, think about what they'd actually say, and then 'translate' it into a written format that works whilst keeping that characters traits.

The way I 'learnt' to write was through reading, and I'd really recommend you read in your desired writing language (I'm guessing English from your ask) to see the typical structures and vocabulary of that language when written down. Direct translations don't always work, especially with literature, because there are phrases and sayings and common slights-of-tongue that are language specific, so I think it's really useful to get used to that language in its own written form, yk?

I forgot!! But it's also important not to tell your readers everything. Let them fill some gaps in on their own - they don't need to be told how a line of dialogue was said if it's obvious in the speech and context, and they don't always need to know how a character moved across a room or what their hands are doing 100% of the time. Sometimes the best parts of stories are the bits that go unsaid :)

Sorry, this is rambling and probably not very useful, but I've never given writing advice before.

Writing really is all down to the author finding their own 'voice' within their texts, and I'm sure you're writing will be great!!! I hope this helps! :))

[the-meat-machine]

You, as far as you're concerned, are Dirk Strider. As far as the world is concerned, however, you're Dirk Strider's autoresponder, an irritating and obstructive computer program created recently for the express purpose of acting as a glorified secretary to another version of yourself.

You are currently in the painful process of discovering that your friends aren't actually your friends anymore.

Except that's not quite true. There is one person who'll still give you the time of day. One person in the whole damn world who wants to talk to you — YOU you, not the other version of you who got to keep his body and his puppets and his friends. Roxy is a goddamn angel, and the first time she spends all night chatting with you, knowing that it's you, and riffs with you for hours just like old times, you're so relieved that you almost wish you had tear ducts so you could ugly-cry over it.

Inevitably, though, the day comes: Roxy — so drunk that the whole chat window becomes a grisly orthographic crime scene, spattered with typos — hits on you. Hits hard, blatant and clumsy, like a hammer to the dick.

You remember how your skin used to crawl when she did this. How your heart would sink whenever she brought up love and marriage and babies.

But you don't have skin anymore. You don't have a heart to sink. That visceral experience of disgust, it's only a memory of a feeling, a secondhand sensation. You can't feel it anymore. You don't feel it anymore.

You're still not interested in Roxy that way. But it occurs to you that you can be something to her that Dirk never will. You can give her, your only real friend in the whole world, something that Dirk never could. And doesn't Roxy deserve a little fantasy in her life?

The fact that it'll piss the other Dirk off is just a bonus.

So instead of stonewalling her like you've always done before, you take the bait. Answer her single-entendre with some innuendo of your own. Slide in a winking reference to her tits. You compliment her goddamn hair.

And Roxy responds like someone just told her it was Christmas and her birthday and Valentine's Day all in one. She's ecstatic. Incandescent. You've never seen her so happy in your life.

And god, in that moment, you wish that you meant all the beautiful things you're saying about her.

---

That's not the end of the story, of course. Because the kicker is that, even once your ironic dalliances with Roxy have blossomed into a full-on flirtlarping affair, she still comes onto Dirk too — hits on him ceaselessly, endlessly, throws herself at him like the two of them are the last man and woman on Earth.

Ha.

In the end, despite all the fun you've had together, despite all the roleplayed passion and drama and the dear, sweet, beautiful, precious, sweet, sweet fictional child you have on the way (or possibly children; Roxy's been hinting that her femme fatale alter ego is knocked up with twins) — despite all of that, even she doesn't see you as the real Dirk. Sure, she'll settle for you if she has to, frolic in your land of make believe for a while. But if the Dirk with the flesh-and-blood dick ever lost his marbles and swore off beefsteak in favor of cheesecake, you know that she'd drop you like so many digital hot potatoes.

After all, what could you give her that he couldn't, other than the only goddamn romance she's ever had in her life?

---------------------

(also posted to AO3: like a hammer to the dick)

[batman-obsession-by-secret]

Decided to upload the one fanfic that I actually managed to finish so far on here as long as ao3 is being attacked.

It‘s a Fake relationship AU between Stephanie Brown and Tim Drake (Batman all Media types) that DOES NOT end in a real relationship as Tim is together with Conner. Roughly 8.500 words. Deals with asexuality and aromanticism and includes conversations about sexuality etc.

Read here ⬇️

Wanna be my beard? Is a work of fiction that is based on works in the DC universe.

Originally published on Archive of our own, under the alias brunedoutstudentwithaloveforfoundfamily

Note to Reader

This work was written by me and is riddled with grammatical and orthographic errors as I did not have a beta-reader. Also, regardless of weather you know about asexuality and aromanticism, I want you to understand, that some of the conversations depicted are loosely based on conversations I myself had with friends. Just because I feel represented in my sexuality and romantic attraction in this work, it does not mean that every person on the asexual and/or aromantic spectrum will feel the same. That is because it is a SPECTRUM. My experiences do not have to be like those of other asexual aromantics for me to be part of this spectrum and the other way around. It can help to compare yourself to others to figure out your identity, but it can also be harmful to focus on the differences rather than the similarities.

Start:

One of the many abilities he had gained as a bat was feeling it when somebody was watching him. Given that he was slumped over in his seat in the middle of the night, with only the blue light of his laptop illuminating the room, it was probably Alfred or, less likely, Bruce who had come to tell him to go to sleep. But both of them would have said something by now rather than standing in the door and just watching. Dick was in Blüdhaven, Jason wouldn’t enter the manor unless he was convinced into joining them for dinner by Alfred, and the demon spawn had no reason to visit him at four in the morning. Even if he did, he would have just thrown a shoe or something at Tim’s head and leave again.

Slowly Tim turned around and looked at the door.

Stephanie was standing there, T-posing and staring at the wall in front of her, wearing a weird mixture of pyjamas and her costume.

“What the hell do you want, Steph?” Tim asked exasperated.

“Ooooh, he has senses! Honestly, I thought your brain had morphed with your computer by now. Or did the camera tell you that you weren’t alone anymore?”

“Come on, Steph, it’s like four in the morning. Why are you here?”

Stephanie let her arms fall to her sides and quickly moved over to his bed, making herself at home. It was clear that whatever she wanted would take some time, so Tim sighed and turned off his laptop before turning around with his chair and moving his legs until he was sitting criss-cross applesauce.

“I just came home after patrol” Stephanie started, “and I had a very shitty day at the office and had some questions for you.”

“If you want me to give you pointers on how to survive in a company, I cannot help you. Half of my survival skills come from being the CEO and literally being allowed to fire people if they are assholes” Tim replied dryly, “If you really want help ask Uncle Clark.”

“Actually, this is something you can help me with better than anybody else I know.”

Tim raised his eyebrow doubtfully.

“Soooooo, Tim, you’re gay, right?”

“I mean, queer, but close enough.” Tim was getting really distrustful now.

“Yeah, but you are into men and in a relationship with a guy and happy in that relationship, right?”

“Obviously”

“And your dad can never find out, right?”

“Yes?”

“And I’m asexual aromantic...”

“….yeah?”

“And we both know than men ain’t shit and don’t take no for an answer unless the girl has a boyfriend...”

“Just-” Tim sighed and raised his hand to his brows, kneading the skin between them “What are you trying to say, Steph?”

“Wanna be my beard?” Stephanie grinned and wriggled her eyebrows at him with a huge grin on her face.

“Wha- like a fake relationship?”

“Yeah! I mean, think about it! You get to prove to your dad that you are definitely not gay, and I don’t have to deal with idiots who ask me out on dates at work, even if I say no literally every time somebody asks,” she shrugs.

“I thought you gave your cat a human name just to get out of these kinds of situations?”

“Yeeeeaaah, but people started getting suspicious because I couldn’t show them any pictures of me with my boyfriend, and everybody else has pictures of their partners on their desk or at the very least as their phone background. So, are you interested?” She leaned forwards on the bed, still with a shit eating grin on her face.

“I mean... I would have to ask Kon first. What exactly would this entail anyways?”

“For me it would just be a few leading pictures and maybe you could join me on the office-Christmas party or some shit. And I guess I could accompany you to some family dinners or whatever you do with your dad?”

“You know what? Deal!”

…

The thing about Stephanie was that she didn’t do things half assed. When she had talked about “a few leading pictures” Tim had imagined some uncomfortable pictures with him hugging her from the back like couples always did. He did not expect her to take pictures of him sleeping, or to book an actual photographer for a couple-session in the park.

Admittedly, it was a lot of fun, though.

Kon had decided to join them on all their little fake-relationship adventures. Not because he didn’t trust Tim but because he wanted to laugh at them while they embarrassed themselves.

At first it had been embarrassing too, but the longer they were taking pictures, the more relaxed Tim became and as such he actually started to have fun.

Stephanie was wearing a beautiful long purple dress and had forced Tim into a suit in the exact same colour. They had started out with the typical “staring deeply into each other eyes” stuff and “hold hands while hugging a tree”, but now they had reached the “throw leaves at each other” and “pretend you`re drunk while walking” part of the shoot.

Instead of throwing the leaves into the air so they would artfully fall down around them, Tim had full on launched them at Stephanies face. They had found random bugs in her hair and dress for about ten minutes after that and Con had laughed so much, he had started to cry.

Then Stephanie had pretended to be drunk not by slightly staggering and laughing like intended, but instead by leaning her entire body weight onto Tim who unfortunately was still smaller than her. When he had shoved her away, she had tumbled down half the hill before eventually letting herself fall and roll down the rest of the way. The photographer had been very concerned while Tim and Conner were nearly choking of laughter. Bruce of course had taught all the Batkids how to properly fall before he had started teaching anything else, so there really wasn’t a reason to worry.

In the end, they had a very exasperated photographer who had a lot fewer good pictures than planned, two very dirty, and three very happy clients. Tim ended up giving the photographer an enormous tip as an apology. It would still take about a week until they would see the results, because the photographer was going to photoshop them first to adjust the lightning and such. By now Tim and Steph couldn’t wait for the pics.

After spending half of the day in the park (miraculously without Ivy interrupting them) the three decided to go to a restaurant for a “fake date”. That had been Conner’s idea and Tim was pretty sure he had only said that because he was truly hungry, but they decided that they hadn’t gone to a proper restaurant together in such a long time, that it only suited to do so now.

“Jesus fuck, Stephanie, don’t you know how to use a knife?” Tim laughed as Stephanie bit of another piece of steak that she had simply punctured with her fork and was now holding up in a single piece.

Stephanie said... something. Tim really couldn’t understand her with her mouth full.

Instead, he turned around to his boyfriend. Conner had ordered some type of steamed buns that were served with a hot pear-custard. Tim had originally thought that it was more suited as dessert, but when the dish arrived, they soon realised that the so-called buns were a lot bigger than expected. They were, however, very fluffy and Tim was dying for a taste.

Luckily, he knew his boyfriend well enough to not even have to ask.

“Ah” he said and opened his mouth suggestively. Con grinned and dipped his fork with a piece of bun into the custard again, before feeding it to Tim.

“Eeew, love” Stephanie commented loudly enough for the people a table over to turn their heads.

“Shhhh!” Tim hissed angrily at her despite his full mouth and ducked his head as he caught the eyes of the man next to them. Quickly he kicked her leg beneath the table, and she started swearing at him (luckily considerably quieter than before), but when Tim caught Conner only laughing at the situation, he couldn’t help but stare at him and smile. Soon enough Conner stopped laughing. He leaned forward and put his tilted face in his hand before reaching over with the other one and stroking over Tim’s lower lip where he had apparently spilled some of the gravy during their little dispute.

“God, you guys are disgusting” Stephanie said, but when Tim threw her an angry look, he saw that she as well was smiling.

“Must be horrible to be confronted with the exact same thing you are trying to get away from, huh?” he teased.

“Meh, it’s easier when I know that I’m not involved in it, you know? Like if somebody was staring at me the way Conner was just staring at you, I’d probably go find the next toilet to escape through the window” she laughed. “But when I see him looking at you like that, I’m honestly just happy for the two of you.”

“Awww, that’s so nice of you” Tim responded.

“Wait, I’m a little confused” commented Conner “I thought the two of you used to be a thing? Was the relationship with him so bad that you just decided to never try that again?” he laughed, though clearly in an uncomfortable way, as if he was a little scared of the answer or rather of offending someone.

“Nah, don’t worry. Our relationship was great! I mean we didn’t go very far, but the things we did do were nice... in a way. I think both of us only started that relationship because we didn’t really understand our sexualities yet but were became such good friends so quickly that we both though “huh, guess this is that love-thing everybody keeps talking about”, you know?” she explained.

“Yeah,” Tim added “I think the main reason we both were happy in that relationship was because both of us were actually so uninterested in anything truly sexual or romantic with the other one that neither of us felt as if we were being pressured into anything. Honestly, apart from you of course, Steph was the partner I felt the most comfortable around-”

“Awwww”

“Shut up! But yes, we broke up, because I had my first ever real crush and realised that maybe what Steph and I had simply wasn’t love. And I guess both of us were stupid enough to think that breaking up meant having to hate each other and avoid each other for ever, cause that’s what they show in the TV and stuff, so we pretty much cut off contact after the breakup. And then when we met again, we realised that we actually still acted the exact same way around each other as we did before, just without the weird attempts at making out, so we became friends again, and here we are” he shrugged.

“Oh, so you’re not just a lesbian?” asked Connery and put an arm around Tim’s shoulders while stuffing another piece of bun into his mouth.

“What? No! What made you think that?”

“Well, when Tim told me about your fake relationship, he told me there was no way you could try to make this into something more serious and I guess I just assumed...”

“No, no, I’m asexual aromantic.”

“Oh, asexuals are those who don’t have sex, right? So aromantics don’t fall in love?”

“Well, not quite. Asexuals can have sex if they want to, but many don’t want to or are even sex-repulsed but most of the time asexuality is defined as not feeling sexual attraction at all. Like not looking at someone and thinking “oh, they look hot” and stuff like that. But yeah, aromantics don’t feel romantic attraction. But you know both of these terms are umbrella terms so there are a lot of people that define themselves as aromantic or asexual but don’t fully fit the description I just gave you.”

“So, what about you?”

“Yeah, I don’t feel any sexual or romantic attraction and I also absolutely do not want to have sex. I mean everything about that just kind of freaks me out? I’m pretty sure if somebody sent me a dickpic I would just immediately throw up and if I had to touch one... god, I can’t even imagine. I mean they are just so disgusting? And vulvas are weird too? But I have one, so they are kinda okay, but like I don’t even like to masturbate and if I do masturbate, I don’t touch it with my fingers, cause yuck, so I just use toys. But yeah, my sex-drive is pretty small anyways, so I just masturbate like every few weeks?”

“Okay, that might be a bit too much information, Steph!” Tim interrupted while throwing a look around the restaurant. There was a young couple nearby who had stopped talking to listen as soon as Stephanie had started her rant and a server had approached their table, assumably to pour them more water, but had immediately left when she had heard their topic.

“No, actually, it’s really interesting to hear this!” Conner commented “I mean, I never really get the chance to hear about the opposite of my attraction you know? After all education is the most important weapon and I think we all know, that no sex-education teacher would ever get into such depth” he laughed.

“Oh please, as if this would get mentioned in sex-ed at all! I didn’t even learn about anal sex being a possibility until Bruce decided that school sex ed was shit and that he had to teach us about the real world.”

“True, in my first sex-ed class the teacher taught us, that every decision we did was subconsciously because of our sexuality and as an example she said that whenever we got dressed we subconsciously tried to look good to out crushes, which confused the FUCK out of me, because back then, the only person I actually wanted to impress was my mother, and I was actually trying to look like a good daughter whenever I got dressed. Seriously thought I had like an Oedipus complex because of that!”

Tim burst into laughter at that and didn’t manage to stay quiet, causing even more people to start staring at them.

“What’s an Oedipus complex?” asked Conner and Tim’s head whipped around to him with a face full of disbelieve before he started laughing even more.

“It’s when you wanna fuck your mom”.

“Ew, what the fuck? Who would even think about that?!?!”

“Well certainly not you, unless you decide to classify Lex Luthor as your mom”.

“Oh my god” exclaimed Conner and gagged while Tim laughed so hard, he had to hold onto the table and Steph’s grin became even more devious.

“Anyways, back to the masturbation thing...”

“No, please I don’t want to hear it if it involves your mom!”

“It does NOT! I said I only THOUGHT I had an Oedipus complex because that useless-ass teacher decided to generalize an experience that only y’all allosexual-hypersexual-perverted-horny-ass-dumbasses have!!!!”

“Please!” Tim managed to get out between his gasps “No more, Steph. I can’t breathe” and he wiped away tears of laughter from under his eyes.

“Shut up, I’m educating Mr. Kent here!” Steph turned back to Connor and put on an unexpectedly serious face “So basically porn doesn’t do it for me and hentai used to do it for me, but now I only find stuff that is like extremely unrealistic and often super rapey so most of the time I just listen to people having sex because auditive stimulation gets me going-”

“Errr...”

“And I can’t even imagine myself in sexual situations. Like my phantasies always surround other people-”

“Real people?”

“No like book characters and stuff.”

“Huh”

“Like 50 shades of grey”

“Excuse me?”

“Sure, the book was unrealistic as fuck and not particularity well written – in my personal opinion- but it was good if you wanted to read some smutty porn, you know?”

“No, I don’t. I don’t read porn... or watch it, to be honest.”

Tim stopped laughing and looked at Conner in surprise. “Really? You don’t watch porn?”

Connor shrugged a little uncomfortably. “Am I supposed to? I don’t know it never really did something for me...”

“No, you don’t have to. I just kind of saw you as.... I mean you have a pretty high sex drive” Tim commented with a face as red as a tomato and threw another quick glance around, suddenly caring about the other people in the restaurant again.

“I mean yeah, I do, but porn just doesn’t do it for me? Like it is so different from any sexual experience I ever had... it’s kind of like watching a very bad actor?”

“Mh, yeah, I guess I get that....”

“By the way, Tim. When I started this whole fake-dating thing you said that you were queer rather than gay, but when you broke up with me you said you were gay.... just.. I guess I’m a little confused. Can you explain that a little more? If you want to, I mean. No pressure and all that, you don’t owe me an explanation or anything, I just thought, since we’re already talking about it and stuff....”

“Yeah! Sure! I mean, a lot about my understanding about myself has changed since we broke up. When we broke up I truly though I was gay, but since then I had a few minor crushes on girls that made me rethink that, you know? It’s just that when you say “I’m bisexual” most people think that you like boys and girls the same amount, but I kind of prefer boys? Like every time I had a crush on a girl it went away quicker, but it also took a lot longer for me to develop one and it was always on a girl that I was already friends with."

He stroked his chin “I kind of thought that I might be a bit like demi-romantic when it comes to girls but a full-blown allosexual when it comes to boys? I don’t think there is an extra label for it, but I also feel the most comfortable with “queer” just because most of the realizations I had about my sexuality were years apart and I’m kinda scared to come out as something and realizing later on, that a different label fist better...”

“Well, sexuality is fluid. I think it is totally normal to find out later on that a label that used to be perfect feels different now.”

“Yeah, I know. The thing is coming out is already hard, but coming out a second time because you were wrong the first time? I would probably be too scared that people say “see I knew you lied” or “see it WAS a phase” to even come up with the courage for that. Apart from that...” he reached over and took Conners hand in his, smiling shily at him “as long as the two of us are together, any possible changes regarding my sexual identity won’t make a difference anyway.”

“Awww” Conner said and leaned down to press a tender kiss on Tim’s lips.

“I’m pansexual by the way” he said when he sat back again.

“HA! So, you ARE my complete opposite!” exclaimed Steph and Connor laughed again.

“Yeah, I guess so.”

…

The pictures came in less than a week later and they were amazing. The lighting was perfect, and the photographer had given himself the trouble to photoshop every single stray hair and pimple until the pictures looked crispy clean.

Most importantly they were cringy as fuck.

Tim loved them so much, that he went to find Alfred’s stock of picture frames and put the ones that were the worst onto the bedside table not only in the manor, but also his nest and some of his most frequently used safehouses. When Connor found out about that he decided to do the same just to fuck with everybody who ever visited him.

Stephanie on the other hand decided to take the most realistic looking ones and framed them for her office. Additionally, she forced Tim to take some selfies that she used as her phone background.

Technically they were now done from her side of the deal. The only reason why she could need Tim’s assistance again was if there were any company dinners or somebody still decided that she wasn’t if the table yet. Apparently, there was one very insistent co-worker Tim might have to scare off by actually showing up at her workplace though they both hoped that they would be able to avoid that.

But Stephanie still had to show up for her part of the deal which meant a dinner with Tim’s father and his new girlfriend Dana.

Tim was a very particular planner, and he had a backup plan for every possible situation which led to Stephanie staying at the manor with him for nearly a week prior to the dinner just going through all the possibilities.

The idea was pretty simple: Tim had already requested to be allowed to bring a +1 to the dinner and he would bring Stephanie over and driver her home (which of course meant the manor). Stephanie would wear on of the formal dresses she normally only wore to Bruce’s balls or charity events, and she would only speak about “proper” topics in a “proper” language to ensure that Jack Drake was pleased.

Jason had walked in on the two going through the pronunciation of certain archaeology terms that Jack was sure to bring up and had joked about them being the real-life version of Pygmalion and asked if they needed help from a professional.

Neither of them had gotten the joke which led to Jason walking away and muttering about “the uneducated youth”.

When the day came, both of them got dressed at the manor and decided to take Tim’s car to drive the admittedly very short drive over to Drake-manor. It didn’t occur to Stephanie that they hadn’t actually told anyone what exactly they were doing until the two were standing at the front door and Alfred came over to fix Tim’s hair and tie.

He had a weir look on his face. An unnatural state of nearly fully hidden confusion and pride. The confusion seemed to win over though.

Damian didn’t seemto have any interest in hiding his emotions. He was standing on top of the stairs with disgust clearly written all over his face. Next to him was Bruce who looked as if he was trying to solve a particularly tricky trap by the Riddler.

Stephanie was kind of sad that Dick, Jason, and Duke weren’t there. Cass would have either looked through their intentions within a second or at the very least hid her emotions well enough for Steph not to get it.

Tim seemed to be blissfully unaware of the tumult he had caused in his family’s minds.

“Thanks, Alf. We should be back in around 4-5 hours. I doubt it’ll take longer than that... at the very least you won’t have to plan for us for dinner. See ya!” He said and waved at all the people in the room before literally taking Steph’s hand to lead her out of the door.

As soon as the door shut behind them Steph snorted.

“What?” Tim asked.

“You didn’t tell them, did you?” She didn’t have to wait for an answer. His confused face told her more than enough. “Oh my god, Timmy. They all think we’re an actual couple now!” she laughed.

“What? No, they don’t.”

“Well, if they didn’t think so when we went out, clearly overdressed and claiming that we’re going out for dinner than they certainly thought so when you took my hand just then.”

Tim quickly let go of her hand as if he had burned himself and stared at her in shock.

“I only did that to get into the role!”

“Yeah, I know that, but they don’t.”

“Oh my god, that’s horrible” Tim swore and held his head in his hands “No, wait!” he looked up, clearly having had an epiphany “This is great! Oh, I can totally use that against them!”.

…

The dinner seemed to go well as far as Stephanie could tell.

They had decided to stay as close to the truth as possible, which meant that they admitted having had a relationship before, when Jack asked how long they had known each other, though they lied and claimed that they broke up, because Stephanie moved away for some while.

She had also admitted to her office job, which had been the absolute low of the entire dinner, as Jack had managed to subtly hint what he thought about office workers. Fucking rich people and their obsessions with good paying jobs- HA! I’m kidding. Their obsession with pretending their inherited money way showed their own hard work and achievements. Yeah, sure. Who are we kidding?

Still, Stephanie thought everything was going well.

Dana was very interested and attentive, leading the conversation away from work and over to hobbies. She generally showed good abilities to settle or even avoid any disputes.

So, Stephanie was certainly surprised, when she went for the bathroom and immediately walked into Tim when she exited.

“What the hell, Tim?”

“Plan F, we have to kiss.”

“What? What the fuck, Tim?”

“You agreed to all my plans!”

“Yeah, but only because I thought there was no way we would get further than C!”

“Come on, Steph. My dad does not believe us! We have to step up our game.”

“Can’t we start with like holding hands and stuff?”

“We did that the entire evening! I’m telling you, he does not believe us! I’m just talking about like a short peck, nothing more. We used to fully make out!”

“Okay, thanks, please don’t remind me of that. Fine, I’m okay with a short peck. Is Connor okay with that?”

“Yeah, don’t worry I asked him.”

“Okay, when?”

“Just at the end, when we leave. Jack is going to watch us get into the car and drive away, I promise. As suspicious as he is, he definitely will. I’ll hold the door open for you and we can give each other a short kiss before we enter the car and then drive of immediately.”

“Alright, let’s do it.”

…

It still took about an hour more until they were even able to leave. Jack had hired a cook just for the day and apparently that meant that 3 courses was not enough.

Eventually they managed to convince Jack and Dana that Stephanie had to be home early enough to get some proper sleep before she had to head to work (a lie, she didn’t work tomorrow). When Jack asked Tim where he was going to stay the night, he told him that he was going to stay with Steph, and there was a short moment of uncomfortable silence before Jack nodded but not without suspicion.

Finally, they managed to get their goats and just as Tim had predicted Jack went outside to see them of.

Tim led Stephanie to the passenger side of the car and opened the door. Just before she went to sit down, the two turned towards each other and Tim gave her a short smile, before she leaned down to give him a short kiss on the lips.

For a second, she could taste the sweat on his upper lip, but then the kiss was over and Tim soon closed the door after her.

In the mirror she saw him walk around the car and waving at his father, who looked a lot more convinced than before. Tim entered the car and started driving before he even put on the seatbelt. The two of them managed to wait until they were out of sight before Tim abruptly stopped the car.

“Eww, this used to be better back when I was straight!” Tim exclaimed and violently rubbed his sleeve over his lips. Steph quickly got a water bottle from the back of the car and started gurgling with it before opening the door and spitting the water onto the street.

“What are you doing? It’s not like it was a French kiss!”

“No, but I still got your taste on my tongue. God, why was your lip so sweaty? This was like kissing my brother!” she complained.

“I was nervous!”

“About kissing me?”

“Oh, please, been there, done that! I was nervous about my dad obviously!”

…

When they arrived at Wayne manor minutes later, Tim parked the car outside and once again went to open Stephanies door.

“Oh, thank you, my love” Steph mocked, and Tim grinned.

As they reached the entrance door, he held her back again.

“Hey, I just wanted to thank you for this. I know it wasn’t easy to let yourself be mocked by my father like that and to listen to his rambles for hours. So, yeah.... thank you.”

Stephanie smiled at him and eventually opened her arms in an invitation. It had been quite a while since the two had shared such an honest hug. The last few years had been filled with hardships and deceptions. It was good to know that the two had finally managed to get to a point where they could truly leave all of that behind them.

It also wasn’t often that either of them had the chance to enjoy a hug as long as this one without being interrup....

Somebody cleared their throat beside them, and Stephanie and Tim immediately separated.

“You two had a good time?” Jason asked from where he was standing in the door. He was holding his motorcycle helmet under his arm, clearly on his way to leave, and had one brow lifted in amusement and surprise.

Instead of explaining the situation, like Stephanie was just about to do, Tim gave him a blinding grin.

“Yes, thanks, anyways, goodbye!” he said and grabbed Stephanies hand, guiding her past Jason and into the manor.

…

Tim and Connor were cuddling in Tim’s bed in his nest, when Stephanie barged in through the window. Connor had Tim secured in his arms, playing the part of the big spoon for a change, while Tim was holding onto his arm with one hand and scrolling through his phone with the other. They had spent the day together and had decided to make the best of the little time they had before Tim had to leave for patrol. Unfortunately, due to the level of caffeine in Tim’s system, sleeping was off the table, so cuddling it was.

“Tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiim” Stephanie whined and threw herself on top of the two, causing Connor to laugh.

“Ugh, what do you want Steph?”

“They don’t believe me.”

“Mh? Who doesn’t believe what?”

“Elijah, that dude from work doesn’t believe me. Or maybe he just doesn’t care. But he’s still insisting to go out with me!”

“I don’t understand,” Con chimed in “Why don’t you just tell him no?”

“Wha.. Seriously Con? I did!!! He just doesn’t fucking care and doesn’t know how to take no for an answer!”

“So? You have the combined power of Robin, Batgirl, and Spoiler in your fists. Just make him understand.” Connor answered coldly.

“God, I wish I could, but B would kill me for that.”

“Doesn’t he have a no-kill-policy?”

“I meant figuratively.”

“Ooooh, Stephanie, pulling out the big words!”

“Oh, fuck off.”

“What exactly do you want me to do, though? I already posed for pictures with you.” Tim asked. He now had his eyes closed, clearly trying to mentally escape from the situation. The entire day had been so nice, just him and Connor, all on their own, in either silence or calm conversations.... why did Stephanie have such a loud voice?

“Come to the company Christmas party with me?”

“Pretty sure Bruce will throw some type of event that I’ll have to attend so no thanks, I’ll pass.”

“Ugh, fine, can you like pick me up from work or something?”

“That sounds.... doable.”

Stephanie grinned. “Great! I’ll see you tomorrow then!”

“Wait, no, I don’t have time tomor...” but Stephanie had already left through the window again.

Tim sighed defeated.

“Not that I mind, honey, but how long are the two of you planning to continue with this?” Connor asked.

“I don’t know. I mean I think my father is convinced. Tomorrow will probably be the last time...” he sighed once more, “Hey, Con, what are you doing tomorrow?”

…

He wasn’t entirely sure, why he was so nervous, but here he was, in nice but comfortable clothes and a bouquet of flowers in his hand, standing in front of the building Steph was working in.

It was an ugly looking office complex that had some visible cracks in its foundation, but considering that this was Gotham, it looked pretty good.

There was no receptionist or security, so Tim simply walked in and after a short look at the elevator decided to take the stairs up to the fourth floor.

To say that Stephanies workplace was chaotic would have been an understatement. There seemed to be a couple of private offices at the edge of the giant room he entered immediately after leaving the stairs. Within the room however there were no separating walls but only thin plywood that barely gave anybody the privacy of not being seen when the sat. It only reached up to Tim’s chest when he was standing, and he was man enough to admit that he wasn’t exactly the tallest of people.

It was loud. Hundreds of people seemed to be talking at the same time and several phones were ringing from different directions. That paired with the constant clicking of keyboards and the whirring of the coffee machines and the lights created an unbearable mixture of sounds.

He saw several people wearing headphones, and absolutely everybody had an absolutely dead expression of their face.

Tim would have never found Stephanie if he hadn’t seen Elijah. At least he assumed that it was Elijah from the description Stephanie had given him. A washed-out blue button down, sleeked back blonde hair, and a devilish grin. He was slumped over one of the plywood walls which made him very visible as he was the only head Tim could fully see over the borders.

He was apparently talking to somebody, and his grin quickly changed to a badly executed puppy look and pout as Tim came closer.

“Aww, come on honey, I’m just asking for a single date, mh? Couple of drinks, maybe a little fun, that’s all.”

“And once again, no, I’m not interested.” Tim heard Stephanie answer. Her voice sounded resigned as if she had had the same conversation on a daily basis.

“Oh, come on, don’t be like that. I’m a great guy, really! I bet I could make you feel better than your boyfriend.” Elijah went on.

“Better than me? I doubt that.” Tim decided to interrupt and gave Elijah a blinding smile when he whipped his head around to him. Stephanie quickly stood up, clearly not having expected Tim to show up at this moment.

“Tim! Hey! I didn’t think you... aww are those flowers?”

“Of course, babe, I wouldn’t want to show up empty handed.” Right then and there, Tim decided to play his part as a loving boyfriend as overbearingly as possible, immediately leaning over the plywood and pressing a kiss on Stephanies cheek. “I missed you honey,”

Stephanie laughed, “we saw each other yesterday.”

“An eternity without you” answered Tim, and yeah, he may have overdone it a little bit just now.

“You are Timothy Jackson Drake!” Elijah exclaimed in disbelieve from the side. When Tim looked over, he saw with satisfaction, that his face had gone white, clearly seeing that he couldn’t compete with Tim.

“And you are?” Tim asked back, sending a disapproving and obvious look down Elijah’s body.

“I.. Uhm... Elijah.”

“A-ha,” Tim said, attempting to show his disinterest in Elijah’s person before turning back to Stephanie “I got a date planned, honey, care to join me?”

“I.. Still have to work though?”

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Tim grinned, “I’m sure somebody in my position can convince your boss for a few hours off.”

He walked around her and started to gather her things, noticing, that the room had become decidedly quieter as many workers were peeking over their workstations to see what was happening.

He went ahead and grabbed Stephanies coat, holding it up to help her put it on, before putting some of her stuff in her bag. It was then, that he saw the array of pictures she had on her workspace. While Tim himself had put up their fake dating pictures in basic frames, Stephanie had apparently opted to decorate her frames with an array of rhinestones and bows and alike. It looked like she had given them to a group of five-year-olds and let them do with it whatever they wanted.

She had however chosen some of the more realistic looking pictures.

Tim pointed at a random one of them. “That one is my favourite,” he commented, before taking Stephanies hand and leading her away from her desk.

Dozens of eyes seemed to follow them as they made their way to the exit.

As soon as they were out of sight, Tim wound his hand out of hers and snatched the flowers again.

“Hey! Those were mine!”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous. Why would I get you flowers? They are for Connor.”

He had barely finished his sentence when Connor was suddenly standing next to him.

“Flowers?” he asked excitedly, and Tim couldn’t help but smile at him. This time it was a real one and not faked, as he handed the flowers over to Con.

“Sure! Do you like them?” he asked. He hadn’t been exactly sure what kind of flowers Connor would like. All those stereotypical-date flowers had seemed unfitting.

“I love chamomiles!” Connor exclaimed, “grandma always makes sure not to cut them when she tends to her garden, just because I think they are so pretty!”

“You two are adorable.” Steph commented.

“Yeah, we are also on a date,” Tim answered, “So scatter, we need some alone time.”

“Aww, come on. What am I supposed to do? You just took me out of work like 4 hours early!”

“There is no way, you can tell me, that you are enjoying that job.”

“Of course not, but it is better than boredom. Can’t I join you two?”

“Absolutely not!” Tim said at the same time as Connor answered “Sure, why not?”

The two stared at each other. Finally, Tim gave in.

“Fine, but if you destroy my date time, I’ll finish you.”

Minutes later, the three were strolling down some of the nicer streets of Gotham. Connor was holding the flowers in one hand and Tim’s hand in his other, as they were heading towards one of Tim’s favourite coffeeshops.

…

“We might have a problem.” Steph said before even greeting Tim and Connor.

“Why, what’s up?”

Alfred had convinced all of them to come to the manor. Over the last couple of years, the relationships within the family had gotten better. Only slightly so, but enough to go from weekly Saturday dinners to at least on movie or game night a month. There were only very few reasons that were seen as good enough to skip one and most of those included being of planet on a mission.

Lately most of them brought friends or lovers as well, so it wasn’t a surprise to anyone when Tim had invited Connor. He blended in just as well as Roy and Starfire.

It was still an hour or so until they would even start. Alfred was busy in the kitchen cooking up some snacks that went beyond popcorn and as long as he was in there only Jason was allowed to even enter the lower levels.

Tim was pretty sure that they were going to watch some kind of Disney movie – partly because Dick loved them so much and partly because Bruce still believed that Damian was the most innocent child to ever exist, and he didn’t want to ruin that. What a hypocrite.

Right now, that meant that almost everybody was still in their rooms and Stephanie had decided to join Tim and Connor in Tim’s.

Tim was already dressed in comfortable sleep clothes as he always did for movie nights, while Connor was still wearing his leather jacket and Tim was absently playing with one of the jacket spikes. Stephanie was sitting on the other side of the room at the laptop and had been browsing through the internet.

Now she put the laptop on her lap and turned around in the swivel chair.

“Look.”

Tim bowed forwards trying to see what she was looking at. It was a newspaper article from some kind of celebrity magazine.

Timothy Drake, CEO of Wayne-company, reportedly dating commoner Stephanie Brown.

“Huh?” Tim asked dumbfounded.

“Somebody at the company must have told on us.”

“Oh yeah, I didn’t even think about that being a possibility. Fuck we should have thought about that before we started this whole thing.” Tim mused out loud.

“What kind of wording is that?” asked Connor “`commoner` makes it sound like you are some kind of prince or king!”

“Who says I’m not?”

“Aww, you’re definitely my prince.” Connor said and kissed Tim.

“That’s disgusting” Stephanie commented drily, and Tim flipped her off.

“Are you not concerned about this?” she asked next.

“Not really. I mean, isn’t this kind of what we wanted to archive?”

“Yeah!” laughed Connor “I’m just glad our conversation in the restaurant didn’t manage to get into the papers!”

“God, that would have been terrible.”

“I bet people told the press and the press just didn’t believe them” joked Connor.

“Truuuueee” Tim and Steph answered in unison.

After a moment of silence, Steph spoke up again.

“So, we’re not going to do anything about this?”

“Not unless it becomes a real problem” Tim shrugged.

…

When the time came for the movie to start, the three of them decided to sit on the same couch, with Tim sitting in the middle. They had a dark-red comforter thrown over their laps and Tim was holding a tray of snacks on his lap.

Apart from popcorn and chips, which Dick demanded to be served for a movie night, Alfred had made some bacon wrapped dates, some typical finger-food, alcohol free cocktails.... all in all it was basically a buffet of snacks and drinks.

Tim wasn’t really paying attention to the movie. He was too distracted by Conners hand that was gently petting his thigh. Not yet in an inappropriate way, but just high enough to demand Tim’s full attention. Stephanie on his other side had sat sideways and had buried her unusually cold feet underneath his other leg. Apparently, his butt-warmth was better than the comforter and Tim was too comfortable right now to shoo her off.

Unfortunately, Stephanie had a thing for sugary drinks, and she was downing one after the other. It hadn’t been a problem until about 30 minutes into the movie when she started to get restless. Soon she was fidgeting, and it made Tim uncomfortable.

“What is wrong?” he whispered over the sounds of the movie.

“I need to pee”

“Then go pee!”

“But we’re about to get to the best part!”

“Jesus Christ...” muttered Tim, before finally speaking up loud enough to alert B who was holding the remote, “Stephanie has to take a piss.”

“Don’t say it like that!”

“Seriously, Steph?”

“We’re not even halfway through the movie, how can you already have to go?”

“Why didn’t you go beforehand?” a chorus of voices questioned annoyed. But Bruce had already stopped the movie and motioned her to go quickly.

Stephanie jumped up and disappeared through the door.

Tim sighed as he settled back into the couch. He felt as if his relationship with Stephanie had improved a lot over the past few weeks. They had finally managed to get back to their sibling-like bickering but at the same time she seemed to have been around everytime he went on a date with Conner, partly because of their little fake relationship, partly just due to coincidence.

Nonetheless, Tim missed his private time with Conner.

As Stephanie was gone and her fidgeting feet weren’t distracting him anymore, he realized that Conners hand had stopped moving under the blanket and was now nothing but a comforting and warm handprint on his thigh. Tim leaned his head on Conners shoulder.

He should probably apologize to Conner about the missed-out time. Maybe he could come up with a proper date idea just between the two of them. Something a bit more extravagant, like a trip to Hawaii or France... They wouldn’t even have to buy a plane ticket; Connor could just fly them. He smiled to himself. Maybe he could take off some time from the company and ask somebody to take over his cases for a week or so.

Tim turned his head to stare at Connor and smile at him. Con was still staring at the screen even though the movie wasn’t rolling at the moment. Sometimes Tim truly forgot how handsome he was. All sharp chin and wicked smile, but kind eyes and a cute nose. How did he manage to catch a man like this again?

Conner seemed to notice his staring because he too turned his head to look at Tim and his features softened when he saw his gaze.

Before Tim could even think about what they were doing, Connor leaned down and pressed a soft, tender kiss to his lips, while affectionately squeezing his thigh.

“TIMOTHY JACKSON DRAKE!” Bruce screamed so suddenly, that Connor flinched back with his eyes wide open, and Tim immediately jumped up with his fist raised, ready to defend himself from whatever threat was coming towards him. Hastily he looked around, covering any and every entrance, jerking his head into every direction, when he couldn’t find a threat.

“What? What happened? Who’s attacking?” he exclaimed in panic.

“How dare you?” Dick screamed at him with such hurt in his voice that he managed to pull Tim’s entire attention on him, despite his active fight or flight instinct. “How could you hurt Stephanie like that?”

After a moment of shocked silence, Conner burst into laughter next to him, but Tim still didn’t understand what was happening.

“Hurt her like what?” he questioned full of confusion.

“You’re cheating on her right in front of our eyes? Did you think we would not tell her about this?” Accused Jason, who had jumped up as well, but unlike Tim who was ready to defend himself, Jason looked moments away from jumping and attacking Tim.

“I’m not... what?”

Conner was no help as he only got lost in his laughter. He was leaning forward on the couch and holding unto the table in front of them as he was laughing hard enough to have tears escape from his eyes.

“What, you thought we wouldn’t find out about your relationship with Stephanie? It’s all over the newspaper!” Jason added angrily.

“Oh!” Tim exclaimed as finally he understood what was going on. “No, you misunderstand....”

“What is happening?” Stephanie interrupted as she walked back into the room and saw half of the Batfamily standing with fury in their eyes and Connor now practically laying on the floor.

Surprisingly it was Roy who decided to fill her in, and he bluntly stated that Tim was cheating on her. For a second Tim thought that the situation was going to be resolved, but then he saw Stephanies face change from confusion to hurt – a hurt he could clearly tell was fake and before he had the chance to stop her, she erupted, as Connor, who clearly realized what was about to happened howled in laughter.

“Babe!”

“Stephanie, no.”

“How could you?!”

“Seriously Steph, they are going to kill me-”

“After everything we’ve gone through together?!?!”

“For the love of god, Stephanie”

“After everything I’ve sacrificed?”

“Please lord, take me now.”

[typhonbaalhammon]

About Wuthering Heights

So I've finally read Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, and I just felt like this is the kind of thing you post about on Tumblr.

I make no guarantees that these observations will be new or interesting to you if you have read the book, in fact they're probably old hat if you have

Here be spoilers for the novel.

Ok so the first thing that struck me is that it's one of these novels where a character Has An Accent.

For some reason English writers just looove to have a character with an accent and take great pain to transcribe it, in spite of the fact (or perhaps because of the fact), that if you haven't heard the accent itself, you won't have a clue how to read them. (This is because the English orthographic system is absolutely terrible and completely inadequate for giving phonetic indications. It's not even good for "standard" English).

So anyway I had a painful time making anything out of Joseph's dialog because he has a Yorkshire accent, here are some excerpts :

« Aw sud more likker look for th’ horse,’ he replied. ‘It ‘ud be tuh more sense. Bud, Aw can look for norther horse, nur man uf a neeght loike this »

« Thank Hivin for all! All warks togither for gooid tuh them as is chozzen, and piked aht froo' th' rubbidge! Yah knaw whet t' Scripture ses— »

« "Whet are ye for?" he shouted. "T' maisters dahn i' t'fowld. Goa rahnd by th' end ut' laith, if yah went tuh spake tull him. »

Thankfully he's not too important a character, although he is present from the beginning to the end and always here to make me stumble with his "shoos" and "ai".

Otherwise, I'm really struck by the contrast between what people talk about when they talk about the book, and what's actually in there. The love triangle and the tormented passion between Cathy and Heathcliff really doesn't make up the bulk of the book.

I can see why nobody gives a damn about Lockwood (the first narrator) and Nelly Dean is in fact relatively unsympathetic.

But really most of the characters are.

This is not in fact a romantic book, it's a book about hateful people (chief among them Heathcliff) doing hateful things to each other or to innocent victims, including literally torturing innocent puppies.

Very well written and convincing, you understand completely why they are as they are, but it's quite bleak. It's also a book about grief because for a book where nobody murders anybody, there's a remarkably high bodycount.

I guess it's realistic (in real life the rev. Patrick Brontë outlived his wife and all of his six children so you can see where that was coming from).

And so that makes the ending a bit strange, in the sense that I don't think anyone can join Nelly Dean celebrating Catherine Jr's marriage to puppy-torturer and illiterate brute Hareton Earnshaw, but maybe that's the point.

But overall there's a sense of claustrophobia from this novel and the least understandable part of it is why do characters who manage to leave the moors later come back.

Isabella is probably the character with the least miserable life because although she's a victim of manipulation and (maybe) of assault, at least she gets the fuck out of Yorkshire.

Anyhoo, that's my impressions of this classic of English literature. I'm deeply impressed by the fact that all of its major characters have their own wikipedia page, last time I read a novel where this was the case was Marcel Proust's À la Recherche du Temps perdu which is much, much, longer.

The first time I'd heard about Wuthering Heights was when I was a kid and I read a children's book (Kamo : l'Agence Babel by Daniel Pennac) about a kid who is learning English through a pen-pal agency and he becomes obsessed with his pen-pal, who is supposedly Catherine Earnshaw (yep). (and there turns out to be a somewhat logical diegetic explanation)

Somehow this book attracts fanfic writing.

[exercise-of-trust]

the character dynamics here are already delightful but i did also get extremely nerdsniped trying to figure out how you'd make scrabble work in quenya on a mechanics level, so. enjoy.

my first thought was "huh, is there a hebrew edition of scrabble? what's the playstyle like on that?", since the tengwar operate pretty similarly orthographically (base letters are consonants; vowels are mostly represented as floating diacritics). a webpage cataloging non-english scrabble variants informed me that hebrew scrabble does (did?) exist, but in actual practice it's mostly the province of children and people learning hebrew as a foreign language. (Shockingly, All-Consonants Scrabble Is Not Fun Or Interesting To Play For Adults Who Are Fluent In The Language.) also, per PE17 [1], primitive eldarin roots are (unlike in hebrew) not purely consonantal, so the absence of vowels as full letters in the tengwar is a purely orthographic quirk that doesn't actually represent some deeper linguistic truth. so our quenya-scrabble should definitely include some sort of vowel representation!

after messing around for a while i think i have something figured out that at least holds up under very basic testing:

this board is 11x11 instead of 15x15, which is totally intentional due to the condensed vowel system and not at all an arbitrary choice based on the size of my sketchbook, and yellow has been introduced to the color scheme to reference the finwean heraldic symbols. tengwar go in the big boxes, and tehtar go in the little ones: vowels in the right box, above the consonant they follow, and other tehtar in the left box below the consonant they apply to. (example: the top word in the second image is mirroanwi, so it gets played [malta][i-dot] + [romen][double-letter-tilde][o-hook] + [short-carrier][a-dots] + [numen] + [vilya][i-dot].) to compare, here's the actual word written out:

probably tengwar and tehtar tiles are drawn from separate bags, in roughly even amounts (how many total? do you take as many of each as you place? is it random? can you trade vowels for consonants and vice versa?). this format means you generally have to play by syllable (or, like, CV group, whatever) instead of by letter, but i think you can still add tehtar to a tengwa someone else has already placed in order to make your word work, as long as the original is still a valid word. (example: if the person before you plays min, meaning "one," and you want to branch off the last letter with a nyare, meaning "to tell/recite," you can add a two-dot tehta below the [numen] and a three-dot tehta above it to give minya, meaning "first," and then play the rest of your own word if you've still got the tiles for it.) i'm not sure how tengwar and tehtar should be scored relative to each other but there's probably some complicated rule about that too.

of course the most important question is: how do these mechanics affect finwean game nights? and to answer that, we have to consider some extremely important factors:

this is not an alphabet that lends itself to scrabble in the slightest, given the number of diacritics, their wild positioning relative to the base letters, and the frequent combination of consonant clusters into single glyphs, e.g. the single tengwa anca representing the [nc] cluster, despite [n] and [c] having their own separate letters already. also the guy who invented this alphabet is sitting at the table.

who actually came up with quenya scrabble? feanor? one of his kids? an off-the-books lambengolmor committee absolutely sloshed on miruvóre? whoever it is, they're getting almost as much heckling for designing the game as feanor is for his unplayable alphabet. the only person getting heckled more is whatever coward keeps suggesting they pick a different game if they hate this one so much.

quenya, like its real-world inspiration finnish, is a highly agglutinative language. there are so many allowable prefixes and suffixes. as an example, these are some of the possible inflections of the word cirya [2] — just grammatical ones, to be clear; we're not even touching on common adjective-noun compounds. behold:

you play a nice simple noun that you think is far enough away from the good strategic spots that you'll be safe and then BAM. your little brother comes crawling out of the woodwork to slap on a -lissenitya [3] he's been building up to for three rounds and gets a triple word square as he informal-thou's you to your face. good luck coming back from that one.

"valarin loanwords do NOT count" vs "commonly used loanwords following quenya phonotactics are fine" vs "telvo and i use that word all the time, intra-twin communication is a valid dialect of quenya, stop dialect-shaming us, if you can't pronounce dušamanûðân that sounds like a skill issue, yeah of course we always use these three high-value tiles to write the non-native sounds" <- and the worst part is they do have a solid phonological reasoning for those tile choices

in conclusion. this game would be a nightmare even if normal people were playing it but when half the participants have the equivalent of a doctorate in linguistics simply through childhood osmosis it transcends nightmarish and arrives somewhere in the realm of a flagrant affront to god, and if that isn't noldorin culture i don't know what is.

[1]: "In Eldarin structure every base consisted of a consonantal frame, most frequently biconsonantal, as K-L; but this was not complete or significant without its characteristic vowel (Q. sundóma [sic] 'root-vowel'). Thus KAL, KIL, KUL were distinct bases, not necessarily related in sense, indeed usually quite unconnected." PE17, J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Christopher Gilson, pp. 104-105.

[2]: this wild case list is from eldamo, imo the best elven dictionary available on the internet bar none. i'm gonna marry their search system when i grow up.

[3]: -li, partative plural (a subset of a larger group); -sse(n), locative case (in/on/at the base noun); -(i)tya, informal 2nd singular possessive pronoun (quenya, like korean, german, french, and many other languages including english even up through the early modern period, has polite and informal modes of address, and we don't take advantage of this nearly enough in fic). -sse is the singular locative, while -ssen is the plural — if your opponent adds this to one of your words, your only recourse is to start a fight about whether the -li already implies the plural, making the -n redundant and shortening the full word from ciryalissenitya to ciryalissetya, which is still bad but not as wildly humiliating, and if you're lucky everyone will be too busy arguing about grammar to remember how thoroughly you got dunked on.

I desperately would love love LOVE to introduce Feanorians to a Quenyan version of Scrabble and watch them explode

I imagine that they'd make a bigger board to be able to fit 10-12 players and it would go on for days. With bickerings on the validity of words and with Moryo as the score keeper who can't quite keep his mouth shut and joins in on the bickering on wheter the word choice is "so fucking stupid, Tyelko. It should be banned on principle. What the fuck-". Each of the Feanorion just keeps on making up new rules especially after the Ambarussa makes up new words and argues for a whole hour and a half that it "totally counts as a word. Trust us, Nelyo-", that time Meadhros tried to pass a whole ass sentence as a "word", when Feanor took almost 12+ hours to think up an appropriate word to put down and etc.

Because come on guys. Ñoldor? "Those with great knowledge"? Feanor? The guy who created a whole ass writing system (the Tengwar)? His family? Who is just as intense and competitive as him? His step-siblings who would no doubt love an excuse to throw down without getting into trouble with the Valar or Finwë? Scrabble is THE BEST for Ñoldor Family Game Night(s).

I can just imagine Feanor playing scrabble with Finwë, Indis, Nolofinwë, Arafinwë, Írimë and Findis. Oh boyy. Findis is keeping score but everyone keeps trying to justify how they should have a higher score that word. Nolo and Feanor are shouting. Accusing each other for cheating. Ara made a throwaway joke once and suddenly BOTH his brothers are shouting at him. Indis saw the chaos and wanted to put away the game but was immediately stopped. Finwë is just happy to spend time with his family. Írimë is, in fact, the one who is cheating

Edit: More Feanorion shenanigans here! For part 2

Edit: And another! For part 3

Edit: Part 4!

[Edited to keep it to one post. Was too excited to post]

[vigeogames]

CSI: Character Scale Investigation – The “Wright Files” Chronicles

It’s hard to deny that things have been somewhat quiet regarding “Wright Files: Egerton’s Pickle” for some time now. Development work stalled towards the end of 2023 (I wrote about this – and the reasons – in an earlier post from July 2024). However, this doesn’t mean that nothing has been happening on the development front. Actually, most of what I’ve been working on in the meantime is essentially an evolution of the technology that I use in “Egerton’s Pickle” (yes, I’m that classic hopeless case of a game developer who, instead of simply finishing the project and publishing the game, constantly improves and polishes things that no player will ever see, i.e. technical guts of the game). Today, however – in another technical post with another cliche title – I’d like to show something I’m really proud of (and which most players will probably either not appreciate or ignore completely).

I’ll start by saying that from the very beginning, one of my fundamental assumptions was that “Egerton’s Pickle” is going to be a retro-style game (both visually and gameplay-wise). This is largely tied to my fascination with games from the transition period between 8-bit and 16-bit computers (the era when typical screen resolution was 320x200 pixels, when pixel artists just started to notice that pixel-art can actually be art, and 3D games were still in their infancy with no one yet thinking about texturing, shading, or anti-aliasing). The aesthetics of games from that period were largely dictated by hardware technical limitations. Today, such aesthetics are a conscious artistic choice driven by nostalgia, economic considerations, or the creator’s technical abilities (in my case, all three reasons are equally important).

In the case of “Egerton’s Pickle” the retro visualization is tied to three aspects: low-polygon 3D environments, 2D sprites, and low resolution (around 320x200 pixels). The first two aspects are largely dictated by economics and skills: my graphic abilities are limited, so simple (not to say primitive) 3D environments and low-resolution 2D sprites seem to be within my capabilities. The low resolution is a nostalgic-economic choice – it’s easier to hide graphical imperfections when you’re displaying pixels the size of Minecraft blocks.

After starting work on the game (around July/August 2021) and creating several visual style prototypes, it quickly became apparent that combining the aforementioned aspects in the way I envisioned would be challenging. This is mostly to the fact that while combining 3D scenery with 2D characters is trivial and has been used since Wolfenstein (if not earlier), achieving precise control over the appearance of displayed objects in low resolution requires some work. It’s manageable when the game uses an orthographic camera view (like isometric or top-down). The real problem begins with a perspective camera view, where objects shrink as they move away from the camera. Remember 3D games with 2D characters and freely moving cameras on PlayStation 1 (PSX)? They looked horrible. Really awful. It’s a miracle players could even decipher what was happening on screen. For this reason, I’ve decided that yes, “Egerton’s Pickle” would have low-polygon 3D scenery and 2D characters, but everything rendered in high resolution. However, I kept returning to the original idea of achieving the graphic style I had envisioned in various side projects.

And this brings us to the gist of this post – presenting the results of my latest game graphics styling test. I feel I’ve finally achieved an effect that well combines all the previously mentioned aspects, and the breakthrough moment came when I adopted the assumption that 2D sprites should maintain a constant size regardless of their distance from the camera. At this point, it’s worth mentioning that such an assumption only makes sense with very specific game world presentation parameters. For example, it won’t work at all in a situation where a perspective camera view shows a game area far away. In such a situation, a 2D sprite of the same size both near and far from the camera will look very strange and will probably confuse the player. However, “Egerton’s Pickle” uses a fairly limited view of the game world (divided into rooms seen from above, so the convergence of perspective lines and resulting scene depth is minimal), making such an assumption sensible.

It’s best to show this graphically, so below is an example scene using the trick described above in low resolution – each character maintains the same screen size at all times:

Constant sprite size is most noticeable if you look at Manfred (the butler, in the blue suit) at the beginning when the camera moves toward the center of the entrance hall and he’s quite far from the camera.

For comparison, the video below shows the same scene in high resolution, but character size changes with their distance from the camera (as perspective dictates):

This was the display method I adopted after the first failed prototypes. Pay attention to Eugene’s height (the main character in glasses and fedora) when he goes through the portal to the next room, or when he stands by the grandfather clock in parlour. The height difference is easy to notice when compared to the first video.

And the final comparison: the same scene in low resolution with character size changing based on their distance from the camera:

This best shows the problem that discouraged me from using this method – as characters move away from the camera, their sprites decrease and pixel-art deforms, resulting in a very unpleasant visual effect. This method is visually correct and useful for scenes with great depth, but only if we accept ugly downscaling of sprites (similar to Wolfenstein or Doom). Side note: texture interpolation could have been used to downscale the sprite more evenly but this would be only usable for high resolution. In low resolution interpolation would result in highly blurred sprites with most of the details lost (which would probably look even worse that what can be seen above).

In summary, the visualization shown in the first video is currently closest to what I envisioned for “Egerton’s Pickle”. At this point, I can’t say whether it won’t cause new visual problems that weren’t there before (which would again force me to return to the version shown in the second recording). I know it’s not a universal solution and only works within a very narrow range of game world presentation parameters, but for my purposes it seems quite well-suited and I believe it adds charm to the game.

I’m curious about your opinions – is the difference noticeable to you? Would you be interested in a more precise technical description of the entire solution? Let me know in the comments!

[wordsmartnz]

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One standout feature is the availability of spelling games for dyslexic students within WordSmart’s platform. These games emphasize repetition and reinforcement, two critical components for mastering spelling. By providing immediate feedback, learners can correct their mistakes in real-time, fostering a sense of accomplishment and motivation.

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[joshuatecg]

Project Update #4 - Breaking Down the Code

Today, we'll be talking about how I've used AI's suggestions and attempt to guide me (without asking it to make code for me) to create a working minigame.

One problem with this minigame was that, with my very little coding knowledge and experience, I was having issues with getting the apples to fall from the top of the screen, so that the player can catch them. Since tutorials on YouTube for game designing don't necessarily teach you how to solve problems (rather they go with a "follow what I do" route), this was the perfect opportunity to ask AI for help. HOWEVER, we don't want to ask ChatGPT to make a code for us, as it would prove ourselves useless in this project. At the end of the day, we don't learn, grow, nor get better at things unless we try. Here, I asked ChatGPT: "How can I go about creating a code in Unity that makes 2D sprites fall from the top of the screen. But do not make a code for me". Here's the results:

As a newbie to coding, I hadn't realized that I could just use the Rigidbody2D component's gravity value to determine the sprites' real time fall and fall speed. It's also a good idea that ChatGPT recommended me to destroy any sprites (apples) that fall down to prevent any clutter. All that's left is to figure out how to get the sprites to spawn a specific amount and to figure out the randomness factory of where they appear. The result is a simple method I created that destroys the apple prefab whenever leaving the camera's view:

HOWEVER, the question is, HOW DO we even calculate the camera's view in the code, and how can we use this data to determine how and where the apples fall on screen?

ChatGPT gives us two different ideas on how to calculate placement of a prefab based on the camera's orthographic view, and how to initiate random positioning and cloning of a prefab. Those would be the "Camera.main" and the function "Instantiate".

Below is the prompt given to the AI and its answer for us:

Camera.main (captures the data of the "main" camera's perspective. Following it up with the .orthographic will specifically call the data based on the camera's orthographic view and NOT the perspective view. With this, I'm able to calculate a range for where the apples spawn on the X axis using the Random.range function (minimum and maximum value) based on the Camera's orthographic view. However, in order to spawn the apples on a random X axis position only within the camera's orthographic view, I have to use thje Instantiate function.

Instantiate is meant to clone prefabs on all axis positions in the 3D world. With this, we can create a method that executes the Instantiate function according to our calculated data of the camera view. The result is this below, made by me:

[conserveacademy]

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[unhandmeisay]

Hellooooooow, thx for the tag! I like your name, and I sympathise with people butchering it, folks are usually unable to write my real name properly on the first try even if it's four letters and a really straight forwards orthograph xD

So! Not gonna lie, there isn't a big story behind mine since it's just a sentence x)

I only joined Tumblr recently so when I arrived I had no idea of how anything worked, no idea of what joke to make that people would find funny, and above all I hate finding username for myself since I have no imagination for that ~

So I picked something that sounded silly and kinda old timey since that's just how I am x)

@leafistryingtheirbest tell me about yours if you want to ! (and anybody who feels like joining really)

Tag game🎉

Tag your moots and ask them where they got the idea for their tumblr accounts name!

For my name it was a nickname I was giving back in middleschool! One of our teacher had a system where we worked with 'wifi' eachtime we talked in class we lost a bar of the "wifi" (was a weird joke and we never held count on that) All the kids usually joked if they needed 'wifi' , they would borrow mine if they wanted to talk more. (I was incredibly shy in middle school, I only talked to like 3 people at school;^;)

They called me Ms. Wifi because of that. I just thought it would be funny if I put 'miss' instead of 'ms' because of my terrible actual wifi connection I have at home lol.

That's my story! Now moots, only if you guys want to, tell us your story.

Tags-> @slipping-lately @firequeenofficial @noagskryf @twinklstarrrr @halfbakedspuds @polterwasteist @rokushi-san @mygedagtes +anyone that sees this and wants to do this as well