#wrt robot stuff

[yoshicolonoscopyfootageofficial]

(Stares at both the pinned and some of ur pics)

So basically, you're a...

...

...hm

400 pounds... 200 centimeters... trans and robogender. Also her looks are Not What Society Calls Attractive and thats like... unimportant??? So what can i say here? "Armored titan"? But thats chitinous armor. "Evangelion"? But what if she has whatched the series. Titan? Well what if she somehow thinks its offensive. Come on i have been given on a golden platter the chance to make someone laugh by making a reference with their character- but how the fuck can i make that if all i have are cartman tier jokes that i cannot even formulate??? I must say something here aaaaaaaa

...uh. i see from your pinned that you're.... taken... good for youuu!!!...!...!!

Fuck yeah i nailed it aaaaaaaaa

not me having a Bocchi The Rock moment in ur askbox because im afraid to say something mean based on your looks no siree aaaaa (autism pain)

Hi

[abimee]

Just wanted to say i love ur nier art and hcs! It's super refreshing to see the girls drawn without boobs as big as their heads like they don't even look like that in the games😭😭😭 I adore their designs and I love looking at fanart of them but so many times it just annoys me w how crazy everyone makes their proportions or how people draw 2b to be all sensual like her ass would not be making that expression...anyway lmfao. I love ur art, a true nier character understander..I've also never thought of trans girl Emil but it makes perfect sense

YAY TY :] im such a similar situation esp w A2 because i really like how she seems to have no ass and a small chest at least compared to 2B so i get sad when people dont find that appealling and have to give her a big ass/chest. nobody likes a yorha unit built like toothbrush but i do.... ive always had it in my head that because shes an older model she was made under different specifications/w different materials so every part of her is super enforced steel while models like 2B have more rubber and carbon fiber (esp makes it easier to repair the body cause you can replace the rubber/fiber outer layer that protects the internals)

so while 2b has more realistic skin and body softness and so a more defined chest and ass due to essentially padding, a2 is like a barbie doll down to the chest carved into the metal so shes not as defined. a2 the napkin girlfriend that might fly out of the window etc etc

[lesser-vissir]

White people stop being racist when you design an RPG setting challenge: IMPOSSIBLE

[malwaredykes]

cuz once again we have some distinctions going on wrt robots/AI in the fallout universe:

1. securitrons, mr handies, robo brains (?) etc as basically task-specialized chat-gpt inside a metal chassis, capable of processing speech and some level of communication and learning but ultimately lackig a consciousness

2. AI like yes man, whose self-awareness as i understand it wasnt fully appreciated by his creators, and whom ultimately you get to treat as like, a person who happens to have some specific circumstances going on in that he gets to live inside a computer and has some limitations to what he can say to you directly that he nonetheless tries to work around in terms of communication. like yeah he cant really say no to you which absolutely DOES have implications and colors your dynamic, and the game reckons with that, you do have to keep that in mind and its up to you how you feel about that and whether its something youre ready to accept in order to pursue your goal. theres also muggy, who unlike the other AIs in the sink clearly has a consciousness and a free will that clashes with his programming, who IS a comedic character but whose existence absolutely does say something about his creator

3. ZAX (and thus also president eden? i dont remember much about him so i cant make a full assessment here), complex conscious sapient AI with free will and self-awareness--and this generally is acknowledged and not put into question

4. fo4 mr handies like codsworth, who have free will, self-awareness, consciousness, who get to be house servants and unpaid dehumanized factory workers and so on and so forth, and are often regarded by people as Fellow Inhabitants, But Worse And With No Agency And Made To Serve, and one has to think about the cruel implications of purposely putting a self-aware consciousness into a Worker Robot presumably so they can be more efficient and versatile and require less supervision

5. synths who are literally just unambiguously people so whats the big idea, unless youre a scumbag of course you dont want them to suffer. meant to be a clunky metaphor but taken at face value its just another instance of like. oppression. irl its always nonsensical at its core and socially constructed innit

you know? so like. we are dealing with different stuff here. and the implications of some going completely unaddressed just baffles me

[tezzbot]

congrats on finishing your essay! :))

Love your Sonic Underground au, btw! I need some lore drops on my boy, Manic, tho. It doesn't even have to be a long explanation. Something goofy like, how many times has he been arrested?

Also! Do the triplets eventually form a band? [side-eye]

Oh my goodness, hello!! I love your art so much it's all so cool!!!! Thank you lol!

Some stuff about Manic in the au lets see...

He was kidnapped as a baby after the triplets had been sent halfway across the continent for their own safety, whoops lol, he's quite charismatic, must always have been since he managed to endear himself to Ferral pretty much immediately lol, he grew up pretty much similarly to the canon of underground, getting by stealing where he has to bartering and stuff, he's part of his own found family within the city and they're all very close, a tight-knit little community of thiefs sfgdhj, though every so often one or two of them decide to spread out (though they stay in touch), which is actually the reason for Manic's being on the train alongside the others, he has family he misses! And he has some things to get to them! (little does he know he'll be meeting more family than he anticipated lol) Though he's never actually been out of the city he grew up in himself (despite what he may claim lol), uhh he is very technically minded he loves to tinker and making little thingamajigs and doohickeys that look like they wouldn't have any practical use but he usually finds a way lol, nothing, like, robotic like Tails does, he's more a manual guy fdsgfgdf, aaand just a random headcanon he's fairly dyslexic n has some trouble reading, he usually has someone help him. There's also gender happening to him :thumbsup:

As for how many times he's been arrested lol uhhhh I think that early on he was pulled up a few times, probably spent some time in juvie, but he hasn't actually been caught in quite a while, I don't imagine Manic gets caught all that often lol you know those videos of kids running from cops and the police just making absolute clowns of themselves trying to catch them? That's Manic JHGJFG

So wrt the band, I'm sort of playing around with ideas right now? The main idea that I'm running with is that, the medallions only react to them when the triplets are getting along, when there is harmony between them (eehh? geddit? lol) that's the only time that they are able to be activated. Which, given the rocky start that they all have with one another obviously takes time, with Sonic being reluctant to share pretty important info with them and generally keeping his distance from them, Sonia's frustration with him and her being Very mad at Manic for scamming her, not much harmony going on for a fair bit of the journey. Eventually the three of them do get along and discover the powers of the medallions and they do perform a few times throughout. Eventually Sonic does spill that they're family and after the reactions they come up with the idea to use their music to get their mothers attention, Sonic is hesitant etcetc. I DUNNO! I'm still futzing with it lol I'll decide on stuff eventually fdghfg

Oh and I do want Sonia and Manic to have their own powers like a lesser version of Sonic's speed but, again, still deciding LOL

Anyway! Sorry this got so long lol, I've thought a lot about this AU! Thank you for the qs!!

OH ALSO Manic uses "bro" and "brother" on Sonic just as a casual thing but the first few times Sonic is like .Does He Know... GJFHG OKAY I'M DONE

[ssruis]

Ruikasa posting that got away from me (again). You guys can’t be mean to me pandemonium is on engsekai in like five days. don’t blame me blame colopale.

Ruikasa is very interesting for me 2 think abt wrt rui and his hang ups bc Rui is very single-minded in going after what interests him - he taught himself robotics/engineering/a million other things, he pursued directing on his own, he would rather stick to his own paths and do what he wants to do instead of do what would make him more palatable to his peers

Rui: I wouldn't be expending my energy on something I don't intend on doing.

Tsukasa: Yes. That's the kind of person you are. You wouldn't be doing something if you didn't really want to...

Rui: right?

(Wonder Halloween)

(Area dialogue)

I don’t feel like hunting down every instance of kids around him going “we don’t want to play with you because it’s dangerous/we think you’re weird” I think I’ve done that enough times. But my point with those instances is that he valued what he loved over attempting to become someone who would fit in.

Desiring to connect with a person beyond the level of just friendship/wanting to know way more about someone is different than studying & learning a subject though, bc it’s

1) typically a two way street in that it’s reliant on the other person to want to share things and want to connect with you in return

2) also reliant on you not fucking up the relationship, which is pretty easy to do if you come out guns blazing like “hey you fascinate me & I want to know what makes you tick. And also everything else about you.”

Both points being something rui has zero experience with. Which is also why I think he opted to ask other people about tsukasa instead of talking to him directly.

(Kaito initial 2*)

(Area conversation)

He’s still very curious about Whatever The Fuck is up with tsukasa tenma but he’s obviously pursuing knowledge a little less intensely/overtly than he does for other stuff

(After talking about movie directing techniques) Director Ohara: … Well, that might not be useful to you as someone who’s aiming to become a stage director.

Rui: …No.

Rui: I’d rather be taught more specific techniques.

Director Ohara: …Huh?

Rui: What I want to create is a show that everyone can enjoy regardless of any limits.

Rui: In order to make that dream come true, I want to learn about direction in all kinds of media.

Director Ohara: …Oh?

Rui: That’s why I want to absorb any ideas and ways of thinking from any field.

Rui: All of the methods you know — please teach them to me.

(Backlight lens flare - TL haruka’s penguin)

All of that to say Rui is very clearly interested in learning more about Tsukasa, but also (imo) very wary of overstepping any social boundaries that would damage their current relationship.

He mentions that he tended to rely on shows to connect to other people around him in Pandemonium -

Rui: I had always thought that I could never properly understand everyone around me.

Rui: As I started doing shows at Wonder Stage with everyone, my way of thinking and feelings began to change.

Rui: Now, I am able to understand and connect with someone without relying on shows, and I’ve come to value the beauty of laughing alongside others.

Rui: that’s why — tsukasa-kun. Thank you for giving me the chance to change.

(Pandemonium - TL tsukasa’s #3 fan)

- which is also the event where he & tsukasa connect more *outside* of shows, and the event that both he and tsukasa acknowledge as an event that made them grow a lot closer. (more recent connect live, wrt them talking abt performing fixer, iirc. I hate to “source: trust me” but we’ve reached my limit for hunting down sources & it’s finding a tweet from forever ago where someone translated what they were talking about)

Anyways. Sorry. I just love that quote & what it says about Rui. I’ll spare you the “directing as a one way street/settling for the closest thing to a connection/laughing *alongside* others instead of providing a show for the audience to laugh at (ensekai if you change that specific sentiment I’ll be so mad)” thoughts. Back to the original point.

It’s interesting to think about how rui’s hang ups wrt friendships and his very intense curiosity/very determined pursuit of knowledge on the subjects that interest him intersect. Like. Before this point, whenever he was interested in something he could just go online and read everything he needed to know and satisfy his curiosity to his heart’s content.

Having to both navigate something completely foreign and pump the brakes on obsessively learning everything he can would be a novel experience for Rui. To say the least. “If I pursue this with as much intensity as I do with any other endeavor I am going to fuck something up (he is suffering)” kind of situation.

Being interested in a *person* is so much different & so much trickier and scarier to navigate. Especially with how much Rui values his relationship to Tsukasa as someone Who Matches His Freak.

and with Rui’s whole “I should be satisfied with what I have and if I’m not then it’s because I’m greedy/selfish” :

Rui: (… Geez, I really lack a backbone. When will the time come when I find myself satisfied with the way things are?)

(…)

Rui: (While working to make my dream come true, together with everyone, I will make their dreams come true. A way to do that — let me think of one.)

Rui: (fufu, how greedy of me.)

(Curtain call - TL Arven Oven & tsukasa’s #3 fan)

(Talking abt wanting to keep doing shows with wxs and his actions in OHE) Rui: Now that I think about it, I’ve been pretty selfish.

(World link - TL haruka’s penguin)

I think Rui’s approach to it would be very “I’m asking for more when I already have a great friendship I’m The Most Selfish Person Alive & must never say anything” which, tbf, would be his reaction wrt having feelings for literally anyone, not just tsukasa. However. Since this is a ruikasa post. unfortunately. I will say that what would be exclusive to Tsukasa is “he’s already given me so much and I still want more… I’m The Most Selfish Person Alive & must never say anything.” Rui is dramatic like that.

[crazyexdirkfriend]

Okay, I've got a sincere ask, since you've got an insanely bright head on your shoulders and I need you to dissect the hell out of Dirkjake so I can use it as a hand guide to navigating smthn in my personal life but like- in one of your posts you state that Dirk's inability to communicate with Jake is (inherently the problem) where as Jake isn't as much at fault (you tagged it with Half Joking, so im treading lightly here) but i was wondering if you could elborate on that? Unless you were actually joking. If you weren't, I'd sincerely like to know why Dirk's communication issues (in terms of fault) highly outweigh Jake's affinity for denial and ignoring all of his issues outright. Are they not both equally at a disadvantage? Is Dirk actually The asshole for his inability to express himself properly?

Hi! Thank you, thank you I'm glad you think so but my supposedly bright head is mush atm. So my opinion on this rapidly changes wrt to post-canon, but that is my opinion on HS proper more or less. I'm not like, super serious on it bc as I've grown up I'm way less hardline on what was basically a messy teenage relationship. But I was very very opinionated on it when I too was 16. I don't remember when the post you're referring to was exactly so just (vague hand wavey) Basically my point is that in HS proper, Dirk and Jake are both bad at communicating, though people typically attribute Jake's lack of communication as being at fault for the ultimate relationship breakdown, alongside Dirk's clinginess. I don't think any of that causes the relationship breakdown as much as the channels of communication being broken on Dirk's end, so I think it's important to look at how Dirk and Jake communicate before any of that.

Okay so for starters, they don't. Dirk and Jake never have an on screen conversation so all Jake's attempts to communicate with Dirk are scuppered. Jake makes genuine attempts to communicate with the real Dirk throughout the first leg of the alpha kid arc, and is blocked every time. When Jake tries to communicate issues via Dirk proxies, he's shut down entirely. Off the top of my head, I'm thinking when Jake tells Hal about Brobot being "tender." Now, I don't ascribe to the belief that the robot is being inappropriate when he says this. I believe Jake is attracted to Dirk and the robot treating him more gently is sending his mind places. However, Hal's immediate response to this is to shut off novice mode, leaving Jake to fight the robot on the harder mode. Hal is not doing this because he legitimately believes this will make Jake more comfortable; he's doing this to fuck with him. Jake speaks up about an issue and is immediately punished for it because Dirk or Dirk-proxy is defensive -> Jake is less likely to speak up. (Side note: a lot of people say that Dirk is not aware of what Hal is doing and does not condone it. This is contradicted in the text when Dirk says he knows Hal is fucking with Jake and thinks it'll teach him to be less trusting in people, and does not contact Jake back himself. Dirk's issues with Hal interfering with Jake only arise later.)

Since they don't communciate, we don't have much to go on about how their conflict styles mesh aside from via Dirk proxies. Which is basically stuff like the above. So when we get to their largely offscreen relationship, the information the audience really has to go on is that Jake appears to have upped and left without saying anything and is hoping the whole problem really just goes away without having to text Dirk back, and Dirk is frantically trying to communicate with him, and assuming that he's too clingy. We don't actually know if Jake HAS communicated with Dirk. All we know is that he's not currently doing so.

My personal belief is that it's a bit of a leap to think that Jake has gone from being vague, dancing around issues, but bringing them up when the issue is actively on the table (brobot, Jane's crush, etc.) to immediately packing a bag and going to the hills without saying *anything.* I just think that Jake is less likely to press the issue if he thinks Dirk is going to take it the worst possible way, and to the worst possible extreme, and Jake is less likely to press an issue if he thinks he's upsetting someone. If "I think the robot is a bit tender" leads to "Ok I'll put the robot on *waterboards you in the sea and beats you unconscious* mode," then "I think I could use some time to myself for a little while" leads to "Ok, guess if you need space so bad I'll stop bothering you and we can just stop hanging out altogether." And Jake, despite wanting space, is very very afraid of his friends all deciding he isn't worth the hassle and abandoning him permanently. So he'd immediately recant and drop it (until he cracks)

Now since we don't know what happens between Dirk and Jake in that gap in the narrative, I'm conjecturing. I suppose my point is that assuming that Jake doesn't communicate to Dirk is also conjecture, and not the natural conjecture I would make based on his actions up until this point. He's avoidant of conflict, not avoidant of conversation. I also don't think Dirk being immediately receptive to Jake asking for space is in line with his actions up until this point- I believe his response would be the above, or continuously "fixing it" until Jake drops it.

My point basically is that if you take all that in isolation, it's a sad miscommunication between an insecure boy who takes things to extremes and another insecure boy who doubts himself and can't stand up for himself. No one is the asshole for that. But it's not in isolation. Dirk allowing AR to interfere with his communication with Jake shuts down the channels of communication before they ever date. If I remember correctly, Jake says at one point that he can't remember when the last time he spoke to the "real" Dirk was. I just don't think it's overly fair to blame Jake for the culmination of a communication breakdown that was months, if not years, in the making on Dirk's side. It's less that Dirk is THE asshole and the only one who did anything wrong, and more that generally when people say there was fault on both sides, Jake is the one who receives extensive criticism on his communication skills. Now ultimately: I'd take this with a pinch of salt. They're kids and their first relationship doesn't work out, it's not hugely important to ascribe fault one way or the other- this is all semantics tbh. I only really argue the point for three reasons. 1. I think it makes for a better narrative reading of Jake repeatedly trying to communicate with Dirk and getting a blank wall pre-game and that wall ultimately crumbling around Dirk's persona during the game. It reads better as a cohesive story 2. I think viewing Jake as "the problem" skewered a lot of people's reading of later scenes in the text, especially when HS was actively updating pre-gigapause, and the portrayal of Jake as "the one who can't communicate" leads to a wooden reading of the other alphas by association. and 3. Hal gets the blame for a lot of stuff people don't want to put on Dirk, which also skewers readings of Hal's actions later on. Now if we were talking EPILOGUES...then absolutely Jake's issues with denial, avoidance, and lack of communication (and terminally low self esteem) are going to play a primary, if not inciting role, in their ultimate relationship breakdown. But that's a whole other post and I'm aware I'm rambling at this point. Caveat: If this is an issue concerning your personal life though as your ask sorta suggests, I'd triple take this with a grain of salt because this is a very specific HS situation and HS is ultimately a story with a plot and characters have to act a certain way and do certain things bc it makes the story go zoom. Real people who may resemble Dirk and Jake are not necessarily going to have matching issues, communication problems, and robo-clone answering machines

[felassan]

Some thoughts on the recent article on DA:D from Tom Henderson / Insider Gaming, under a cut due to potential spoilers for DA:D -

first, the usual set of disclaimers that accompany all leaks: might not be real, unable to verify at present, sometimes leakers think they're right about things but are unintentionally incorrect or got some wires crossed, games change a fair bit between development phases and final release, take with grain of salt etc

Tom Henderson is the one that leaked the game's title, 'Dreadwolf', ahead of time, along with Jeff Grubb.

all the stuff about the possible/speculated release window doesn't feel like new information really? for a while now rumors and guesses etc have been saying like 'late 2023 or 2024', sorta thing

The game still lacking features and completed character lines etc doesn't sound odd or surprising either. DA:D is currently playable from beginning to end, but not finished, as BioWare said themselves in the milestone announcement blog post a few months ago. iirc, at that stage in development there can still be placeholder assets, stuff without textures yet, 'robot-voiced' or still-silent lines, placeholder text and textures, etc.

I wonder who the sources are? playtesters? going by yesterday's Reddit leaks (DA:D spoilers at link), that wouldn't be outside the realms of possibility. I also wonder how familiar with the franchise said sources are. some bits of or language in the article make it sound like either they and/or the writer aren't super familiar.

There are 'central hubs' in previous DA and ME games, which were of course singleplayer: Party Camp, Skyhold, the Normandy etc. the PC goes to those locations between story missions and between side quests to regroup, talk to companions etc before heading out again. I'm curious what form the hub/base in DA:D will take - a camp, home, fort/castle, ship, secret base, a pocket somewhere 'in-between' worlds etc?

Recruiting and growing companions, completing missions, companions being found in the hub (or their own mini-hubs as in DAII), giving them equipment/modifications & so on - all things found to some extent in previous games. I guess it does confirm these features will return in DA:D.

Re: combat and FF15, emphasis on "the game's combat wheel" as being what's similar

also not really surprised by the description of the combat. DA changes significantly game to game and the rough trajectory since DA:O has been away from the tactics style of game towards more of an action-y RPG. it also lines up with the feel of the little snippet of combat we saw in a trailer (remember the footage of the character in Grey Warden armor doing Shield Wall?) and some comments that cropped up on ResetEra from possible playtesters in October 2022 (they mentioned God of War 2018 as a comparison point for example).

Re: controlling party members, it says "currently". that said, the playtester who was the source of the leaked screenshots and gif on Reddit also reported that they could not control the party. iirc this was also among the comments on ResetEra. this will vary from person to person, but personally for me I'm not bothered by the premise of being mostly unable to control squadmates. it's kinda like that in ME and ME:A and that was fine (for me I mean).

I'm curious about what other details they were provided with, and will be keeping an eye out for future reports. seems like quite a few leaks have been going on lately.

sometimes companies 'leak' stuff on purpose or want certain stuff to leak, in order to gather feedback, see peoples' reactions to it, as a marketing tactic etc. Mark Darrah said that wrt quantitative focus testing at least, there's a high chance of leaks and they know it. on his game development YouTube channel, on this he advised "Be careful that anything you put in there has a high probability of leaking, but that's potentially an opportunity. If you have information that you kind of want to be leaked out into the greater sphere of the internet, including it in a quant test, knowing that in all likelihood it's going to leak, might be a way to test the waters. It gives you plausible deniability if it does end up leaking. A good example of a leak like this was the concept picture of Dorian for Dragon Age: Inquisition. The concept piece includes a monkey. We never really had any intention of having a monkey for Dorian, but it was just what was drawn in the concept piece. And so we got to watch the internet react to this character, with a monkey, on the internet." I'm sure I've read or heard somewhere that the Dragon Age: Inquisition character concept feedback survey was leaked intentionally and that the devs kind of wanted the Crestwood demo to leak (and were surprised when it didn't result in many videos online).

"It’s understood that you’ll be able to move from your hub to missions by passing through a mirrored portal." - this is the most interesting snippet in this article to me. the obvious question is, eluvians? In Trespasser, Solas tells us he controls the eluvian network now, after over-riding the magic personally. So: have we gained control of part of the network (Briala controlled part of it for a time)? taken control of it or part of it from Solas? is there more than one network? have we built some eluvians of our own? In Trespasser banter Dorian was wondering about building eluvians of our own. there are some folks with eluvian knowledge kicking around like Merrill and Morrigan, and there are glassworks of note in Serault..

moving from a hub to missions through eluvians was exactly what we did in Trespasser from the Winter Palace, and it worked really well. Trespasser's setup was really enjoyable. it was a fun mechanic that helped explain fast travel and apparent teleportation. it also allowed for travelling to places all over, from the Deep Roads to ancient elven ruins to places in-between the waking world and the Fade - a variety of handcrafted places to explore still but with a tighter storyline threading through them, as opposed to open-world that felt like it was probably mandatory to include during development because of other games on the market like Skyrim and AC, but which then struggled to be filled with meaningful content to fill the space and in which that struggle was apparent. I'd be down for that. I'm just daydreaming and speculating wildly now for real (bc it's fun) but we could travel all over Thedas that way. We did that in DAI I know but you know what I mean? also what if the hub is in a pocket dimension, reachable only via eluvian? eluvian secret base..

[replicasoul]

💛 - if you are comfortable sharing, what is your headcount? do you keep track of it? / 📼 - do you have any non-human alters? if yes, which species are the majority of them? / 🌱 - do you have a headspace? if yes, describe it! if no, do you want one?

finally getting around to these 💛 - honestly No Idea at this point. there are about 5-7 ppl who front super regularly. We Think. there might be more, its hard to tell. there are definitely More who likely front less often and are more like. internally-inclined? idk how to put that. but we havent actually taken the time to do any sort of Count. and i feel like it could fluctuate wildly over time (it has before). so Who Knows. mayb we should start that 📼 - literally none of the members of our system identify as like. Human. all of us have weird kin shit going on that is EXTREMELY prevalent for us in terms of identity/gender stuff, but which we pretty rarely Actually talk about. one of the things that complicates this, though, is that while there are Patterns that we have wrt what forms/kin things/etc each system member Tends to gravitate towards, none of those are set in stone and All of the 'usual' things span multiple 'species' or whatever you want to call them. so like. we have a lot of yknow. forms/gender/kin stuff that are Robots, Object Heads, Monsters, Aliens, Objects In General (especially living swords or machines), Furries, Plushes, Pooltoys, Balloon Dogs, Cryptids, Suits (think like. lethal company employees or HUNK from resident evil), etc. etc. etc. etc. and different system members might stray more towards some of those forms than others, but its honestly all over the place and is really confusing to keep track of. which is part of the reason we rarely talk about kin stuff at all (the other big reason being shame/embarrassment, but thats a different issue) but essentially it boils down to 1. figuring out who the fuck is even fronting 2. figuring out what form or kin or w/e that person is feeling like and both of those can switch multiple times even on a single day so the short answer i guess is: none of use ID as human In The Slightest, but as for What we are, its fucking complicated 24/7

🌱 - yes, but its been something thats been a lot fuzzier as of recent, and we generally feel less-inclined to try and mess with it these days (always feels like a waste of time, even though it can be helpful; it used to be) our headspace has Weird mechanics and is weirdly consistent. we've always been pretty naturally good at like. mapping/figuring out Physical Spaces and such, so i guess that makes sense, but it's been wild to describe it to other plural folks w/ headspaces and have them essentially go "no mine isnt like that at all, what the fuck" we have actually based a couple of different writing projects around it (Prismic Sanctum and Oubliette specifically, both are older projects not currently updating, but still worth a potential read) and continue to mess with it as a worldbuilding concept here and there if i had to boil it down: it's a massive collection of various areas that are all in a consistent layout, that could be mostly mapped out with cardinal directions. so like, if you travel North from Area A, you end up in Area B. you will Always end up there. same thing with traveling through doors, etc. some spaces are vague about distance (like the forest between the mass of highways hanging over a void and the big ashen wasteland; traveling through it has different, inconsistent travel times) but Directions are pretty much always set in stone, even then. physical space also doesnt always make sense. you may go to the 2nd floor of a 4-story apartment building, find a trapdoor in an apartment, go up into it, and end up in a castle that cant physically exist at the same time as the apartment building. but, that trapdoor will ALWAYS lead to that place, so locations are just about Always consistent the type of locations also vary wildly. often theyre either places that are possible in the real world but a bit Off (like an elementary school where gravity outside/on the playground is reversed so you can fall into the sky, or a mansion where the physical space is larger or smaller in comparison to you depending on what doors you walk through), or, theyre entirely surreal spaces that are completely impossible (like the aforementioned clump of many highways suspended over a black void that are lit by yellow streetlights, or the basement thats several miles wide with varying ceiling heights, or the motel where every room leads to some different, impossible space) it can be genuinely fun and interesting to """""Explore""" it, even though i know its just our brain generating all the weird spaces. its like one of those homemade TTRPG games that you play by yourself, where even though a Lot of it is coming from your own imagination, its still fun to mess around with

[prettyboykatsuki]

ari other than obviously trusting & communicating with your partner do you have any nuggets of info to look out for or thoughts specifically wrt subspace and/or aftercare in bdsm—receiving or giving?

no pressure. im doing my actual due dilligence research its just some of these sites n sources sound hella clinical and robotic and ur an actual living breathing approachable sex-positive person in comparison so i thought to ask.

hello!! i want to start by saying im deeply underqualified for such an ask. i do play and have some experience but it is minimal imo given the fact i have 1. a long term partner and 2. have had like 3-4 subs in my life to play w otherwise + im very young. im not a professional so take my words as anecdotal / personal

but on an individual level im told im a good partner so here my person to person advice / things i do for aftercare to check in on people im having sex with

the cop-out answer is that every person is different and learning to gauge your partners needs is a matter of practice and patience. not everyone needs the same thing and that's alright. it's also something u should talk about before a scene!!!

this is a given but worth mentioning but the first step is always stopping any stimulation. turning off toys, untying your partner, taking out gags - things of that nature. changing the sensation slowly is important imo. after that check on any injury and see what level of care it needs. attend to these physical, immediate needs first.

now that that is taken care of this is my more personal thing

for me usually, there's a ten minute period of me simply talking my partner down from subspace. sometimes that's praise, sometimes it's idle talk and that depends on the person. but slowly letting someone down, assuring them that they're okay and you're with them. it's more about grounding really? the intensity of a scene can be jarring even it doesn't seem that way so for me this is like... a requirement. this includes some physical touch depending on who im with!! but i usually save that for the end. like post shower and shit

sensation check-ins come after. im a sadomasochist so in a lot of cases there is a fair amount of pain involved. i like to sit my partner down on the bed and sort of run my clean hands on an injury. i don't ask for pain scale on one to ten. i prefer to ask if they still feel mobile, if the pressure i put on the area is dull or sharp, how numb they are etc. this is smth you get better at slowly and u adjust to accordingly. if there's any injuries, i take note of them and care for them in the shower

basic hydration and sustenance. this one is important to me personally for a lot of reasons but you'll see it basically in every single bdsm aftercare advice things. normally i help my partner get down a bottle of gatorade and give them a protein bar. if someone is my established partner i basically always cook for them after we have like. sex sex djksdk but you don't always have to do all that lol. just make sure those basic needs are met for BOTH OF YOU!!!!! something light is fine just no empty stomachs it will lowk make u loopy and irritable

showering / cleaning up together!! wiping them down a warm towel, getting in the shower together stuff like that. i like having a little fun skincare routine if it was a super intense scene. but i think the act of helping your partner w that is always really nice and helps establish intimacy. i normally tend to wounds and such here.

as the domme aftercare for me is usually a lot of physical touch and being told my partner enjoyed what i did to them. it's also necessary for me to be able to dote on them in some way. it's hard to explain but being able to service my partner in an intimate nonsexual way is suuuuper necessary so i don't drop. i also love to be kissed.... some soft making out yk

it seems counterintuitive but it makes me a little anxious to not be able to do those things. helping w basic care and things like that are really important to me and someone letting me do that for me is also very important to me. i also like being able to stim afterwards w a chewy and zone out while my partners hangs out in my arms and we have like parallel play time.

i have different routines w every person ive ever been with but these are some of the more basic universals. again everyone is different. how intensive aftercare depends on how intensive a scene but i normally hit these four every time, just more or less in depth depending. i hope this helps you in some way!!!

[boxeboxer]

Good luck with your oc wiki RJ! Props to you I change small bits of my oc canon so often thinking of sharing the full summary stresses me out how frequently I'd have to update it lol. Perhaps once I'm more accustomed to tumblr I will join you in spreading the robot sf propaganda 🫡

I do have an actual lore ask! What period of retro tech inspired Ouro/ what era exactly is the technology based on? What's the personal computers vs super computers situation like if tech such as krtrim exists? That is to say were krtrim a large advancement or is the surrounding world technologically advanced in daily life?

THANK YOUU 🫶 i feel the same way lol i'm constantly changing stuff in my head so some parts are left intentionally vague that way i have some wiggle room. but atp i'm also like fuck it who cares. look at my complicated lore boy.. the robot sf agenda starts effective now effective immediately

the tech is mostly based on 80s-90s era computers! semiconductors are more scarce in-universe, so while they do have transistors and aren't using vacuum tube logic boards, processing speed is notably slow. SSDs/flash memory isn't a popular choice for this same reason, and HDDs remain the primary way to store non-volatile data. CRT monitors are favored, and LCD screens that do exist are pricey and usually only seen in small applications

high-end personal home computers are pretty clunky and about as fast as an crappy early-2000s laptop. while transistor parallelism has stagnated, memory capabilities are on par with what we can achieve today. supercomputers are a huge money sink and are usually only owned and operated by universities or government agencies. since the transistor is a bit of a novelty, scientists haven't had the chance to miniaturize them to nanometer size, so these computers will easily take up a whole building and don't come close to the processing power of supercomputers we see today

krtrim aren't "computers," rather they are electric entities that operate computers. with their current technology, artificial intelligence is still in its very primitive stages, and they view it in a similar way to how we thought of "sentient machines" in golden age sf (almost grandiose and fantasy-like, whereas now we know these are unrealistic). "AI" tends to be used interchangeably wrt krtrim, but its definition is different from how we define it in our world. it's why the official term for them is "computational human phantom" instead!

all that to say when krtrim were first introduced people were definitely surprised LOL.. they're out here using giant dinosaur PCs and all of a sudden there's sentient robots walking around

[holdoncallfailed]

wouldn't even mind the "the body horror the machinery the juxtaposition of blood and bones gorehound the eroticism of transformation consuming someone is the highest form of love blah blah blah" thing if anyone was genuine about it it's so boring because it's like almost nobody actually cares or is thinking about it half of them are just trend hopping and making the same post over and over again. imo 😴😴😴

yeah i mean to me personally i don't find violence that interesting on an aesthetic or narrative or WHATEVER level, i think it's frequently used in a symbolic context by people who are not creative enough to come up with a more interesting representation for the message of their work. it comes across as trite and sophomoric or simply just lazy. like ok yeah we all had our tarantino phase, let's move on!! i think it can be utilized well but only in certain contexts (i.e. fine art [paintings, sculpture] where the medium is itself traditionally understood as austere and inert and the violence of the image contrasts with that association) and by very talented creators who are actually trying to say something interesting and new about humans and their bodies and the relationships between people etc. which most people aren't.

and don't get me wrong i love a good freudian stabbing scene but there's so much more interesting stuff you can get into wrt psychoanalysis particularly in cinema if you like...actually study the subject and see what people have been writing about for years and develop your own opinions in response to them. the politics of horror media are really complicated imo depending on what school of thought you're coming from, particularly in regards to body horror/depictions of non-normative bodies across different film genres. and of course the misogyny and racism involved as well...

i don't care about the eroticism of the machine stuff because i genuinely think it's stupid LOL it's just not to my taste at all. who gives a shit about a robot it's a robot. but i'm also allergic to sci-fi in general so that's a personal problem i guess. and i don't like vampires because i don't like Creatures or anything supernatural. i want REAL LIFE baby!!!!

but in the end ur right it's just trend hopping and most ppl aren't reading or even watching whatever media is always included in that kind of post, they just see blood consumption eroticism holy holy and hit reblog lol. which is fine i don't read everything i reblog quotes from. still...a little effort would be nice

[cosmics-beings]

I personally encountered the opposite problem - there was an incident not long ago where some people who headcanoned Starscream (and several other characters) as transfem got really angry about people using she/her for Megatron, or saying Megs was a lesbian. Made me really sad :( . Whether it's Star, Megs, or any other character, it's saddening when people attack queer headcanons like that, and I'm sorry people said that about Star. like we're all trying to enjoy the same alien robots and the way we see ourselves in them, and even if we interpret them differently it shouldn't be hard to respect others interpretations

Even if I didn't see it happen, I 1000% believe it, because again, this fandom is really weird with hc characters as femme and like i said, a lot of people tend to project their own identities into characters and get really upset when feminity is something ascribed to a character in a non joking or nonsatrical manner.

(I remember some people were getting mad at Ratchet being seen or portrayed as a woman/transfem and having she/her pronouns by fans. )

i probably wasnt in the fandom during that, but i believe it. while i'd wanna say it was probably dudebros, i wouldn't be surprised if it was actually other queer people. the people who are angriest the most at femme starscream tend to be queer folks which are so jarring. It makes me happy to see that lesbian/fem megatron (and starscream) are overall so popular.

So it wouldn't surprise me if I saw those same arguments for Megatron if it was also queer people. but i could also see it being dudebros who know nothing about transformers past Michael bay's scrap metal grave yard.

But regarding fem megatron:

Twitter is really the place that introduced MEE to lesbian fem megatron, and i actually really like it. that is one thing that i like about some secs of fandom, that femininity and identity is not assigned to body type. and fem megatron is pretty and i love her. but it doesn't surprise me that people got offended by that.

and it's shocking (but not shocking) that there was a whole discourse over that.

When it comes to starscream, every so often, I see people really getting in their feels and really getting mad. I ever have come across people who are like 'block me if you use she/her pronouns for starscream', and that is just off putting and misogynistic, and i won't even go into why that is, especially when it's not harming anyone. and i do believe what you're saying about megatron too. he's also a character people tend to cling on to and heavily project on.

(wrt to megatron and starscream, it has made me sad to see some megatron fans say stuff like 'im tired of starscream being portrayed as feminine, it's time for megatron to be feminine and starscream to be masc'. it's not common, but i have seen some megatron fans upset that starscream is feminine and they are vocal about it, because megatron is not?? but it's also okay to want megatron to be feminine without shitting on feminine portrayals of starscream or acting like fem starscream compared to Megatron is bad. if it gets to you so much make them both feminine or just make megatron feminine and Starscream masc without having to shit on feminine portrayal of him. as someone who likes both characters that used to make me feel guilty. i know this wasn't 100% the point of this ask and sorry for derailing. i just assume if we're talking about both, then i wanted to share this. and it's sad because, i haven't ever actually seen any femme!starscream fans upset at femme megatron, in fact those are the ones who mostly make megatron femme. at least I'm thinking of a few )

i'm glad i don't see it happen often, but whenever it does, it's just really really...ugh.

And i agree too, we should all be able to enjoy our interpretations, especially when fem hcs (whether transfem, queer femme, etc.,) aren't the majority in fandom content at all. And like at the end of the day, if you don't like someones interpretation well, that's fine. what's not okay is being shitty and misogynistic toward people. and honestly, i do have to raise an eyebrow at people who are uncomfortable at fem/femme hcs for characters like starscream and megatron as well. that's just weird to me. there's never not going to be anything weird to me at people vocally hating to see characters being femme. and i don't mean genderbent in harmful, cis-heterenormative ways. i meann getting mad at queer people for making characters queer + fem.

And for me , personally, I always thought it was interesting for aliens to be fluent in their appearance, gender. they are literally alien beings so it's not like they'll have the same concept of gender. one of my personal hcs, especially for miners is that they're all inherently 'nonbinary' simply because when they were created, they didn't have the concept of gender. so sometimes they flip-flop with their genders. and i think stuff like that is just fun to explore.

[autopotion]

Gravity Rush 2 rant post incoming:

The Hekseville chapter really drags in the second half /: A lot of ppl hated the last mission of the Jirga Para Lhao chapter, but I would take the living city any day over a many-headed and many-limbed blob that's constantly vomiting on you. Like it was just out of nowhere how disgusting it was

Other thoughts about the Hekseville chapter:

I REALLY loved the Jirga Para Lhao chapter, like more than anything in the first game. The world was beautiful and colorful, the NPCs had more depth than the first game's, and it was refreshingly frank about classism and imperialism. Like it wasn't perfect or even all that deep, but I was actually surprised at how much it committed to the bit. The upper class in Lei Havina were all white, blond-haired and blue-eyed, in contrast to the much more varied people on the other levels (which the latter was so cool to see in like, character portraits and stuff), and the ones that weren't rude or downright cruel were completely out of touch with how their wasteful lifestyles contributed to the violence the people on the lower levels experienced. Kat is allied with a group of folks indigenous to JPL who were kicked out, who then successfully take their city back. It was cool to see that treated as good and uncontroversial in a lighthearted fantasy game.

So I was sort of expecting those same themes to carry into the Hekseville chapter.

They did not.

Okay first: I actually really liked going back initially. For one, it was cool to see the city I'd grown attached to after all that time with the first GR, and for another, I was excited about the changes. There's a new superheroine in town, and she's doing Kat's job! Surveillance robots have taken over the street! You need a registration number to live anywhere! And worse, an entire district of the city is so impoverished, the trains don't even run there anymore! It's just like JPL! I sympathized with Kat's loneliness over no longer recognizing the city she called home and felt very curious about how all of these things were tied together--because surely they were?

They were not. It devolved into your standard mad scientist vs superhero plot, where the police are innocents caught between the horrible new government and protecting the people. It would've made me groan in anything, but after the previous chapter, I was more disappointed than anything.

A lot of the problems I had with the first GR reared their ugly heads in this chapter too, principally NPC unfriendliness. For some reason the games love the two assholes who, when Kat rescued them, blamed her for destroying their house (she did not do that). The writers thought that their continued hostility was hilarious for some reason. You interact with these two an awful lot.

If you're not interacting with them, you're interacting with Kali, who steals Kat's thunder, or the police, who are, quite literally, Kat's only positive relationships in Hekseville. Which is maddening. Like in the first game she had a wobbly relationship with the police--mostly the military--in that she got on with Syd, for example, but still butted heads with the government quite frequently on which lives were worth protecting, and directly defied them several times. Not here. In one mission, you have to protect the police from Kali, who is working for the new evil mayor (but the police aren't?).

I guess GR2 didn't want to do a rehash of "military dictator takes over Hekseville and makes things worse for everybody," but they also didn't want to discard the trappings of a military dictatorship. So all the tensions they set up wrt to that--the surveillance bots, the mandatory registration numbers, the decaying infrastructure of Endestria--are later normalized. The bots start acting nefariously (because constantly surveillance wasn't nefarious enough), someone FINALLY complains about them, and Kat has a line to the effect "well it's just a machine doing what it's programmed to do... /:" Kat tells Raven to get a registration number to avoid the hassle (even though she got hers from the overarching villain of the chapter, and that wasn't hinting at his bureaucratic malevolence I guess?). And nothing is done about Endestria, ever, until, after the end of chapter 3, Lisa and JPL show up, and teaches the police to open shelters for the unhoused. Wow. Three years of this nonsense, and they never thought of that!

The Kali and Dr. Brahman stuff never goes anywhere interesting either, but that's a rant for another post.

--Except in how it ties into the Missing Orphans stuff, which. I can't even tell what's going on there anymore? Like, what happened to the ark from the previous game? We spend a decent chunk of the first GR in the orphan town, learning about Raven's backstory, and then they completely disappear from the plot, and only are referenced again through... Kali and Cecie? I've been led to believe that Raven's DLC actually retcons the entire thing, which... okay. Lol. More reasons to not be emotionally invested in the plot of the last game, I guess.

I cannot overstate how much I hated Blob Kali. I'm saying it again because it bears repeating. She blows chunks (literally). One of the worst boss fights ever.

After this chapter I'm so ready to be done with the game, but I have Chapter 4 left, which FINALLY gets into Kat's backstory. I'm hoping that's a more enjoyable experience than the end of Chapter 3 was because good lord. Rant over.

I'm for real not a hater of GR2, like honestly, Zoe can confirm I've been singing its praises for the last few weeks. I actually LOVE the game as a whole. But this part was a huge slog so I'm complaining about it on my blog. As one does.

I saw someone on reddit say that GR2 has higher highs and lower lows than the first GR, and I 100% agree. The parts I love about GR2 I love more than anything from the first game, but the parts that are bad are really bad. The first GR was more consistent in tone and quality IMO. GR2 > GR1 for me, ultimately, but. Yeah.

[mithridacy]

read We are Legion (We are Bob) on recommendation from my family. it is hard to explain how much i felt this book sucked on every possible level

this is a book about meeting ur clone and yet fundamentally it fails to ask any interesting question about that proposition. Like 'how would different experiences change u' (they are ~quantumly~ different at birth so ones the sad one and ones the homebody one from 1s after creation, no experience needed) (characters do not grow and change). or even 'would you fuck your clone'!!!

bob software is at a nerd convention which is how we know we like him (but he ISN'T SMELLY and he ISNT WEIRD LIKE COSPLAYERS). he signs up to get cryogenic'd, talks to his family in the worst dialog of all time. then gets hit by a truck

he wakes up in the 2100s oh nooo the USA is gone the religious fascists took over. but not EPIC DOCTOR iforgethisname who watches star trek. anyways dr epic is like "yeah buddy we bought ur brain scanned it and we wanna make u a slavedroid. u don't have personhood but we can still be fwiends right. im secretly an atheist so u know im cool". anyways he does the minihungergames which involves controlling robots and whoever uses them best gets to live yayy. he does it because he can code. isn't that cool. dear reader can u code?? doesn't that make u better than ur friends? <- author

It tries to do a The Martian where yk, science helps somebody do cool sci fi shit. but the author is a software engineer who cannot imagine a discipline that couldn't be solved by a better App so fundamentally all the "science" is "i wrote a simulation" or "i wrote swarm-robot code and the robots built x".

It's transhumanism without the trans and without the humanism. this is a "humanist" tract that is fundamentally calvanist in its beliefs about the human capacity to change and grow. Brazilians are treated as a sinful inferior race with no possibility of redemption im not even fuckin kidding. the book sucks its dick off about pacifism and then says but maybe a racial cleansing of the rabid Brazilian is in order....

there is no sense of structure of climax. the last chapter arrives without fanfare being exactly as dull as all the other. was genuinely surprised when it was over

for an ostensibly hard sci fi book that is constantly fellatiating itself and the reader for how scientific they are, the space combat scenes demonstrate a shockingly nonexistent grasp of things like 'momentum'. in one chapter our heros are doing a strafing run at 0.2c. A conventional missile accelerates from a standstill to be right on their trails, at which point the heros do dogfighting shit in space, buzz the tower several times. then the book goes right back to sucking itself off by talking about how long it'd take to decelerate to orbital velocity

(response to unrecommend a book ask game)

sdjkfsjdf yeah this sounds like a very frustrating read, and the brazil part absolutely bizarre and gross ??. wrt to the "hard scifi" part, does it at least do anything interesting w the software stuff that the author does know? i mean it seems like no given the Apps.

[paradife-loft]

re: last post, writerly navel-gazing -

like, it's definitely something I (feel like I) do really have to engage with, and probably something good to engage with in general, in the context of creating and writing Star Wars OCs?

because you do obviously in canon get the fantastical magic perfect robot arm situation happening (multiple times), and so that sets you up to start with a sense of, well even if it's not based on anything real that works, that's still.... the tech level of the worldstate as it exists? or, I mean, ""tech"", in the same way that lightsabers are ""tech"", which is to say the "it looks cool, handwave the mechanics" fashion. and the fact that this is already a feature, impossible magitech that doesn't have any substantive relationship to real technology, kind of then feels harder for me to just toss the robot limbs as a worldbuilding element in some form, because there isn't a "contradicts the type of (un)realism in the rest of the story" coherency argument against it?

(coming from another angle, there's the "confined in how you can primarily visually represent your character by the options in the video game CC" aspect, which.... as far as I can tell, will not always but certainly can help people rationalize shit they might otherwise not have, because of the way it's a nudge in one (fairly hegemonic) direction; it's not quite the same as saying "no, your choice can't be that one, it has to be this other one" because you start out only considering between the options hard-coded for you - a What Is rather than a What Could Be. and then, y'know... playing a character who looks substantially different in your head than onscreen is... well, I find it pretty unpleasant and mindfucky, anyways.)

bringing it down to my personal specifics, and not just general swirling thought-and-question clouds.... definitely going to be chewing on some stuff wrt how Rivka uses (/doesn't use) her own arm prosthetic, in a more concrete day-to-day logistics sense, and that angle of impact on her thoughts & feelings on it. like, it was already a Thing that especially the fancier "upgrades" (to both of her limbs) that she got after joining the Jedi, were a lot more about social pressure and casual propaganda, and end up being largely a tool for seeming ""normal"" within the Order and among other people her missions put her in contact with. but..... hmm, there's a difference even still between "finds them unnecessary but still goes with it anyway and isn't materially impacted in actual limb function", and "this is actively a downgrade in certain respects, and that's a source of frustration and resentment". in any case, I do think I'm shifting things around in my mental landscape to have her prosthetic arm be very much a "sometimes" thing, rather than more toward the side of "permanently plugged in".