#you can read the whole thing for free on the internet archive

[paul-simon-juggling]

Tonight I bring you two increasingly chaotic Simon & Garfunkel anecdotes, courtesy of Penny Marshall from her autobiography, "My Mother Was Nuts."

[rjalker]

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, by Edwin Abbot Abbot, published in 1884, is public domain. That means it has no copyright, and belongs to everyone.

This post will have links to as many versions and adaptations of it as I can find, and will be updated whenver I find new links to add.

Feel free to copy and paste this whole entire post and make it a new post for your own blog too!

None of these links are piracy, because you literally cannot pirate what has no copyright. Anyone who tells you you must pay to read the original Flatland is scamming you.

The only time you should be spending money on Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, is if you find a cool physical copy that you want specifically.

Check the original post before reblogging to look for updates if you are seeing this post days, weeks, or months after I originally post it.

____

Visual books:

Public domain:

The Original Novel:

Read online or ownload the original book in multiple formats from Project Gutenberg

Read or download from Standard Ebooks

Read and download from the Internet Archive. This also includes a computer-generated audiobook.

_

The 2024 translation:

Read online or download the 2024 translation in multiple formats from the Internet Archive. This also includes a computer-voiced audiobook.

Read the 2024 translation here on tumblr @flatland-a-2024-translation

___

Audiobooks:

The original novel:

Listen to the original book on the Internet Archive, read by Ruth Golding

Listen to the original book on the Internet Archive read by David "Grizzly" Smith

The 2024 translation:

Listen and read-along with the lazy audiobook of the 2024 translation on Youtube

___

Free visual media with full stories:

Here’s an animation from 1965. Contains some flashing lights.

Here’s a stop motion film from 1982 in Italian with English subtitles

Here’s an animation from 2006

The 2007 Flatland film by Ladd Ehlinger is free on youtube. Unfortunately Ladd Ehlinger is a virulently racist and misogynistic conservative who thinks feeding school kids is the same thing as slavery. His film is filled with almost constant flashing lights and spinning cameras that cause headaches, motion sickness, migraines, and seizures.

Here is a link to timestamps for these if you still choose to watch it.

The film ignores all of the politics from the original novel because the creator of the film agrees with the bigotry the novel condemned. You are much better off watching another visual adaption or reading the original or translated book.

Especially if you suffer from photosensitivity or motion-sickness, this film will make you want to throw up.

___

Shorter visual media:

In-universe

Part 4 of a Korean animation. from 2010. Haven't found parts 1-3 yet.

A short animation from 2020 showing an Equilateral being taken away from his Isosceles parents

Flatland Heist from 2013, A short animation from 2013 where the Narrator and Sphere team up to rob a bank :)

Flatland a Romance of Many Dimensions Alternate Timeline (without audio yet) 2024 Here's the version with audio

No Nonbinary Door 2024

A Visit to Lineland 2024

Up, Up, and Away 2024

Meta:

A short TED-Ed summarizing the math parts of Flatland from 2014

Another short animation explaining the math of Flatland from 2012

A long presentation (38 mins) about the math in Flatland. from 2017

Youtube Shorts:

A very short animation about the narrator meeting the Sphere

___

Related books by other authors, in publishing order:

Public domain:

An Episode of Flatland: or How a Plane Folk Discovered the Third Dimension. With Which is Bound Up an Outline of the History of Unæa by Charles Howard Hinton. (1907) Public domain, unlimited reading and downloading. It's terrible. But you can rewrite it to make it not terrible.

The 4D Doodler, by Graph Waldeyer. Also on Youtube as an audiobook.

Other copyright:

The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics by Norton Juster (1963) Can be borrowed by 1 person at a time. A short....poem? Nothing to actually do with Flatland.

The Incredible Umbrella by Marvin Kaye (1980) Can be borrowed by 1 person at a time. I have not read it yet.

Sphereland: A Fantasy About Curved Spaces and an Expanding Universe, by Dionys Burger. (1983) Can be borrowed by 1 person at a time. It's racist. Was intended to be a sequel to Flatland, but the author's racist and failed every lesson Flatland tried to teach.

“Message Found in a Copy of Flatland” by Rudy Rucker (1983) free to read online from the author.

The Fourth Dimension, by Rudy Rucker (1984). Can be read for free online from the author. I have not read it yet.

The Planiverse: Computer Contact With a Two-dimensional World by Alexander Keewatin Dewdney (1984) Can be borrowed by 1 person at a time. Good 2D worldbuilding, nonexistant plot and boring abrupt ending.

Flatterland: Like Flatland, Only More So by Ian Stewart (2001) Can be borrowed by 1 person at a time. it's useless crap that unironically defends the bigotry against Irregulars from the original novel by pretending it's just natural selection that's totally natural and not at all artificialy and violently upheld to uphold the supremacy of the Circles.

Spaceland by Rudy Rucker (2002) Can be borrowed by 1 person at a time. I have not read it yet.

VAS: An Opera in Flatland (2002) by Steve Tomasula. no copies donated to the internet archive yet. I have not read it yet.

A 2024 Summary of Flatland. Buy a physical copy here. Buy a digital copy here.

__

Neopronoun short stories:

The Breaking Point, a short story of a Line and Isosceles in another country of Flatland, attempting to deal with an abusive officer of the military who's invited himself into their home. Almost 4k words.

First Day of School, a young equilateral has zov first day at school, and discovers that the "specimen" they're supposed to be studying is someone zo knows.

Gaining a New Perspective, a short story of the Sphere contemplating everything that's happened after throwing the narrator of Flatland back down to his plane. Almost exactly 5k words.

Other short fiction:

[link me your stories and a short summary to go here!!]

__

Please feel free to add more links and I'll add them to this original post.

Here's the first masterpost I made which has fewer links.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Chapter One of “Picks and Shovels” (Part 1)

Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton.

My next novel is Picks and Shovels, out next month. It's tells the origin story of Martin Hench, my hard-charging, scambusting, high-tech forensic accountant, in a 1980s battle over the soul of a PC company:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels

I'm currently running a Kickstarter to pre-sell the book in every format: hardcover, DRM-free ebook, and an independently produced, fabulous DRM-free audiobook read by Wil Wheaton, who just nailed the delivery:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/picks-and-shovels-marty-hench-at-the-dawn-of-enshittification

Picks and Shovels opens with a long prologue that recounts Marty's misadventures as a failing computer science student at MIT, his love-affair with computers, and his first disastrous startup venture. It ends with him decamping to Silicon Valley with his roommate Art, a brilliant programmer, to seek their fortune.

Chapter one opens with Marty's first job, working for a weird PC company (there were so many weird PC companies back then!). I've posted Wil's audio reading of chapter one as a teaser for the Kickstarter:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGXz1mkAd2Q

(Here it is as an MP3 at the Internet Archive:)

https://ia600607.us.archive.org/5/items/picks-and-shovels-promo/audio.mp3

The audio is great, but I thought I'd also serialize the text of Chapter One here, in five or six chunks. If you enjoy this and want to pre-order the book, please consider backing the Kickstarter:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/picks-and-shovels-marty-hench-at-the-dawn-of-enshittification

Chapter One

Fidelity Computing was the most colorful PC company in Silicon Valley.

A Catholic priest, a Mormon bishop, and an Orthodox rabbi walk into a technology gold rush and start a computer company. The fact that it sounded like the setup for a nerdy joke about the mid-1980s was fantastic for their bottom line. Everyone who heard their story loved it.

As juicy as the story of Fidelity Computing was, they flew under most people’s radar for years, even as they built a wildly profitable technology empire through direct sales through faith groups. The first time most of us heard of them was in 1983, when Byte ran its cover story on Fidelity Computing, unearthing a parallel universe of technology that had grown up while no one was looking.

At first, I thought maybe they were doing something similar to Apple’s new Macintosh: like Apple, they made PCs (the Wise PC), an operating system (Wise DOS), and a whole line of monitors, disk drives, printers, and software.

Like the Mac, none of these things worked with anything else—you needed to buy everything from floppy disks to printer cables specially from them, because nothing anyone else made would work with their system.

And like the Mac, they sold mostly through word of mouth. The big difference was that Mac users were proud to call themselves a cult, while Fidelity Computing’s customers were literally a religion.

Long after Fidelity had been called to the Great Beyond, its most loyal customers gave it an afterlife, nursing their computers along, until the parts and supplies ran out. They’d have kept going even then, if there’d been any way to unlock their machines and use the same stuff the rest of the computing world relied on. But that wasn’t something Fidelity Computing would permit, even from beyond the grave.

I was summoned to Fidelity headquarters—in unfashionable Colma, far from the white-hot start-ups of Palo Alto, Mountain View, and, of course, Cupertino—by a friend of Art’s. Art had a lot more friends than me. I was a skipping stone, working as the part-time bookkeeper/accountant/CFO for half a dozen companies and never spending more than one or two days in the same office.

Art was hardly more stable than me—he switched start-ups all the time, working for as little as two months (and never for more than a year) before moving on. His bosses knew what they were getting: you hired Art Hellman to blaze into your company, take stock of your product plan, root out and correct all of its weak points, build core code libraries, and then move on. He was good enough and sufficiently in demand to command the right to behave this way, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. My view was, it was an extended celebration of his liberation from the legal villainy of Nick Cassidy III: having narrowly escaped a cage, he was determined never to be locked up again.

Art’s “engagements”—as he called them—earned him the respect and camaraderie of half the programmers and hardware engineers in the Valley. This, in spite of the fact that he was a public and ardent member of the Lavender Panthers, wore the badge on his lapel, went to the marches, and brought his boyfriend to all the places where his straight colleagues brought their girlfriends.

He’d come out to me less than a week after I arrived by the simple expedient of introducing the guy he was watching TV with in our living room as Lewis, his boyfriend. Lewis was a Chinese guy about our age, and his wardrobe—plain white tee, tight blue jeans, loafers—matched the new look Art had adopted since leaving Boston. Lewis had a neat, short haircut that matched Art’s new haircut, too.

To call the Art I’d known in Cambridge a slob would be an insult to the natty, fashion-conscious modern slob. He’d favored old band T-shirts with fraying armpit seams, too-big jeans that were either always sliding off his skinny hips or pulled up halfway to his nipples. In the summer, his sneakers had holes in the toes. In the winter, his boots were road-salt-crusted crystalline eruptions. His red curls were too chaotic for a white-boy ’fro and were more of a heap, and he often went days without shaving.

There were members of the Newbury Street Irregulars who were bigger slobs than Art, but they smelled. Art washed, but otherwise, he looked like a homeless person (or a hacker). His transformation to a neatly dressed, clean-shaven fellow with a twenty-five-dollar haircut that he actually used some sort of hairspray on was remarkable. I’d assumed it was about his new life as a grown-up living far from home and doing a real job. It turned out that wasn’t the reason at all.

“Oh,” I said. “That makes a lot of sense.” I shook Lewis’s hand. He laughed. I checked Art. He was playing it cool, but I could tell he was nervous. I remembered Lucille and how she listened, and what it felt like to be heard. I thought about Art, and the things he’d never been able to tell me.

There’d been a woman in the Irregulars who there were rumors about, and there were a pair of guys one floor down in Art’s building who held hands in the elevator, but as far as I knew up until that moment, I hadn’t really ever been introduced to a homosexual person. I didn’t know how I felt about it, but I did know how I wanted to feel about it.

So Art didn’t just get to know all kinds of geeks from his whistle-stop tour of Silicon Valley’s hottest new tech ventures. He was also plugged into this other network of people from the Lavender Panthers, and their boyfriends and girlfriends, and the people he knew from bars and clubs. He and Lewis lasted for a couple of months, and then there were a string of weekends where there was a new guy at the breakfast table, and then he settled down again for a while with Artemis, and then he hit a long dry spell.

I commiserated. I’d been having a dry spell for nearly the whole two years I’d been in California. The closest I came to romance was exchanging a letter with Lucille every couple of weeks—she was a fine pen pal, but that wasn’t really a substitute for a living, breathing woman in my life.

Art threw himself into his volunteer work, and he was only half joking when he said he did it to meet a better class of boys than you got at a club. Sometimes, there’d be a committee meeting in our living room and I’d hear about the congressional committee hearing on the “gay plague” and the new wave of especially vicious attacks. It was pretty much the only time I heard about that stuff—no one I worked with ever brought it up, unless it was to make a terrible joke.

It was Murf, one of the guys from those meetings, who told me that Fidelity Computing was looking for an accountant for a special project. He had stayed after the meeting and he and Art made a pot of coffee and sat down in front of Art’s Apple clone, a Franklin Ace 1200 that he’d scored six months ahead of its official release. After opening the lid to show Murf the interior, Art fired it up and put it through its paces.

I hovered over his shoulder, watching. I’d had a couple of chances to play with the 1200, and I wanted one more than anything in the world except for a girlfriend.

“Marty,” Art said, “Murf was telling me about a job I thought you might be good for.”

The Ace 1200 would have a list price of $2,200. I pulled up a chair.

Fidelity Computing’s business offices were attached to their warehouse, right next to their factory. It took up half of a business park in Colma, and I had to circle it twice to find a parking spot. I was five minutes late and flustered when I presented myself to the receptionist, a blond woman with a ten – years – out – of – date haircut and a modest cardigan over a sensible white shirt buttoned to the collar, ring on her finger.

“Hello,” I said. “I’m Marty Hench. I—uh—I’ve got a meeting with the Reverend Sirs.” That was what the executive assistant I’d spoken to on the phone had called them. It sounded weird when he said it. It sounded weirder when I said it.

The receptionist gave me a smile that only went as far as her lips. “Please have a seat,” she said. There were only three chairs in the little reception area, vinyl office chairs with worn wooden armrests. There weren’t any magazines, just glossy catalogs featuring the latest Fidelity Computing systems, accessories, consumables, and software. I browsed one, marveling at the parallel universe of computers in the strange, mauve color that denoted all Fidelity equipment, including the boxes, packaging, and, now that I was attuned to it, the accents and carpet in the small lobby. A side door opened and a young, efficient man in a kippah and wire-rim glasses called for me: “Mr. Hench?” I closed the catalog and returned it to the pile and stood. As I went to shake his hand, I realized that something had been nagging me about the catalog—there were no prices.

“I’m Shlomo,” the man said. “We spoke on the phone. Thank you for coming down. The Reverend Sirs are ready to see you now.”

He wore plain black slacks, hard black shiny shoes, and a white shirt with prayer-shawl tassels poking out of its tails. I followed him through a vast room filled with chest-high Steelcase cubicles finished in yellowing, chipped wood veneer, every scratch pitilessly lit by harsh overhead fluorescents. Most of the workers at the cubicles were women with headsets, speaking in hushed tones. The tops of their heads marked the interfaith delineators: a block of Orthodox headscarves, then a block of nuns’ black and white scarves (I learned to call them “veils” later), then the Mormons’ carefully coiffed, mostly blond dos.

“This way,” Shlomo said, passing through another door and into executive row. The mauve carpets were newer, the nap all swept in one direction. The walls were lined with framed certificates of appreciation, letters from religious and public officials (apparently, the church and state were not separate within the walls of Fidelity Computing), photos of groups of progressively larger groups of people ranked before progressively larger offices—the company history.

We walked all the way to the end of the hall, past closed doors with nameplates, to a corner conference room with a glass wall down one side, showing a partial view of a truck-loading dock behind half-closed vertical blinds. Seated at intervals around a large conference table were the Reverend Sirs themselves, each with his own yellow pad, pencil, and coffee cup.

Shlomo announced me: “Reverend Sirs, this is Marty Hench. Mr. Hench, these are Rabbi Yisrael Finkel, Bishop Leonard Clarke, and Father Marek Tarnowski.” He backed out of the door, leaving me standing, unsure if I should circle the table shaking hands, or take a seat, or—

“Please, sit,” Rabbi Finkel said. He was fiftyish, round-faced and bear-shaped with graying sidelocks and beard and a black suit and tie. His eyes were sharp behind horn-rimmed glasses. He gestured to a chair at the foot of the table.

I sat, then rose a little to undo the button of my sport coat. I hadn’t worn it since my second job interview, when I realized it was making the interviewers uncomfortable. It certainly made me uncomfortable. I fished out the little steno pad and stick pen I’d brought with me.

“Thank you for coming, Mr. Hench.” The rabbi had an orator’s voice, that big chest of his serving as a resonating chamber like a double bass.

“Of course,” I said. “Thanks for inviting me. It’s a fascinating company you have here.”

Bishop Clarke smiled at that. He was the best dressed of the three, in a well-cut business suit, his hair short, neat, side-parted. His smile was very white, and very wide. He was the youngest of the three—in his late thirties, I’d guess. “Thank you,” he said. “We know we’re very different from the other computer companies, and we like it that way. We like to think that we see something in computers—a potential—that other people have missed.”

Father Tarnowski scowled. He was cadaverously tall and thin, with the usual dog collar and jacket, and a heavy gold class ring. His half-rim glasses flashed. He was the oldest, maybe sixty, and had a sour look that I took for habitual. “He doesn’t want the press packet, Leonard,” he said. “Let’s get to the point.” He had a broad Chicago accent like a tough-guy gangster in The Untouchables.

Bishop Clarke’s smile blinked off and on for an instant and I was overcome with the sudden knowledge that these two men did not like each other at all, and that there was some kind of long-running argument simmering beneath the surface. “Thank you, Marek, of course. Mr. Hench’s time is valuable.” Father Tarnowski snorted softly at that and the bishop pretended he didn’t hear it, but I saw Rabbi Finkel grimace at his yellow pad.

“What can I help you Reverend Sirs with today?” Reverend Sirs came more easily now, didn’t feel ridiculous at all. The three of them gave the impression of being a quarter inch away from going for each other’s throats, and the formality was a way to keep tensions at a distance.

“We need a certain kind of accountant,” the rabbi said. He’d dated the top of his yellow pad and then circled the date. “A kind of accountant who understands the computer business. Who understands computers, on a technical level. It’s hard to find an accountant like that, believe it or not, even in Silicon Valley.” I didn’t point out that Colma wasn’t in Silicon Valley.

“Well,” I said, carefully. “I think I fit that bill. I’ve only got an associate’s degree in accounting, but I’m a kind of floating CFO for half a dozen companies and I’ve been doing night classes at UCSF Extension to get my bachelor’s. I did a year at MIT and built my own computer a few years back. I program pretty well in BASIC and Pascal and I’ve got a little C, and I’m a pretty darned good debugger, if I do say so myself.”

Bishop Clarke gave a small but audible sigh of relief. “You do indeed sound perfect, and I’m told that Shlomo spoke to your references and they were very enthusiastic about your diligence and . . . discretion.”

I’d given Shlomo a list of four clients I’d done extensive work with, but I hadn’t had “discretion” in mind when I selected them. It’s true that doing a company’s accounts made me privy to some sensitive information—like when two employees with the same job were getting paid very different salaries—but I got the feeling that wasn’t the kind of “discretion” the bishop had in mind.

“I’m pretty good at minding my own business,” I said, and then, “even when I’m being paid to mind someone else’s.” I liked that line, and made a mental note about it. Maybe someday I’d put it on my letterhead. Martin Hench: Confidential CPA.

The bishop favored me with a chuckle. The rabbi nodded thoughtfully. The priest scowled.

“That’s very good,” the bishop said. “What we’d like to discuss today is of a very sensitive nature, and I’m sure you’ll understand if we would like more than your good word to rely on.” He lifted his yellow pad, revealing a single page, grainily photocopied, and slid it over the table to me. “That’s our standard nondisclosure agreement,” he said. He slid a pen along to go with it.

I didn’t say anything. I’d signed a few NDAs, but only after I’d taken a contract. This was something different. I squinted at the page, which was a second- or third-generation copy and blurry in places. I started to read it. The bishop made a disgusted noise. I pretended I didn’t hear him.

I crossed out a few clauses and carefully lettered in an amendment. I initialed the changes and slid the paper back across the table to the bishop, and found the smile was gone from his face. All three of them were now giving me stern looks, wrath-of-God looks, the kind of looks that would make a twenty-one-year-old kid like me very nervous indeed. I felt the nerves rise and firmly pushed them down.

“Mr. Hench,” the bishop said, his tone low and serious, “is there some kind of problem?”

It pissed me off. I’d driven all the way to for-chrissakes Colma and these three weirdo God-botherers had ambushed me with their everything – and – the – kitchen – sink contract. I had plenty of work, and I didn’t need theirs, especially not if this was the way they wanted to deal. This had suddenly become a negotiation, and my old man had always told me the best negotiating position was a willingness to get up from the table. I was going to win this negotiation, one way or another.

“No problem,” I said.

“And yet you appear to have made alterations to our standard agreement.”

“I did,” I said. That’s not a problem for me, I didn’t say.

He gave me more of that stern eyeball-ray stuff. I let my negotiating leverage repel it. “Mr. Hench, our standard agreement can only be altered after review by our general counsel.”

“That sounds like a prudent policy,” I said, and met his stare.

He clucked his tongue. “I can get a fresh one,” he said. “This one is no good.”

I cocked my head. “I think it’d be better to get your general counsel, wouldn’t it?”

The three of them glared at me. I found I was enjoying myself. What’s more, I thought Rabbi Finkel might be suppressing a little smile, though the beard made it hard to tell.

“Let me see it,” he said, holding his hand out.

Bishop Clarke gave a minute shake of his head. The rabbi half rose, reached across the table, and slid it over to himself, holding it at arm’s length and adjusting his glasses. He picked up his pen and initialed next to my changes.

“Those should be fine,” he said, and slid it back to me. “Sign, please.”

“Yisrael,” Bishop Clarke said, an edge in his voice, “changes to the standard agreements need to be reviewed—”

“By our general counsel,” the rabbi finished, waving a dismissive gesture at him. “I know, I know. But these are fine. We should probably make the same changes to all our agreements. Meanwhile, we’ve all now had a demonstration that Mr. Hench is the kind of person who takes his promises seriously. Would you rather have someone who doesn’t read and signs his life away, or someone who makes sure he knows what he’s signing and agrees with it?”

Bishop Clarke’s smile came back, strained at the corners. “That’s an excellent point, Rabbi. Thank you for helping me understand your reasoning.” He collected the now-signed contract from me and tucked it back under his yellow pad.

“Now,” he said, “we can get down to the reason we asked you here today.”

Check out my Kickstarter to pre-order copies of my next novel, Picks and Shovels!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/09/the-reverend-sirs/#fidelity-computing/

[shinesurge]

I think it's a side effect of having a slightly bigger audience than before, but this year I've been getting a LOT of questions about offering digital editions of the KC books so I wanted to talk about it out loud for a bit.

There are a bunch of complicated reasons I've never offered the volumes as digital downloads, and I think they mostly boil down to concerns about the pretty embarrassing lack of significant internet presence Kidd Commander has accumulated over the 11 years it's been running. The audience I DO have is very enthusiastic, and let me be clear that I appreciate how unique and cool that is, especially in the era we're in where I really have no business running things the way I do lmao

The problem is, in refusing to do any of the predatory social media bullshit that tricks people into doing advertising for my comic while pretending it's a fandom, and by taking initiative to build fandom spaces for people to hang out in myself, I've created an extremely insular community where folks don't really feel any need to help it grow. "If you build it they'll come" is true, but the other half of that is people going "hey neat this thing builds itself!" and you end up with dozens of fandom posts, hours of discussion, and even fanwork locked away in inaccessible spaces while the pages on the site consistently get no comments or interaction and the public tags are empty.

WHAT does this have to do with digital editions lol

The idea was, a thing that helps set KC apart is the webcomic thing where you're not only checking a site regularly as a routine, but you're building some impression of the author as well. My little news posts are bundled with the pages, the site gives a sense of Environment in way static editions don't. In return for offering nearly a thousand pages of completely free content the reader has to Encounter Me at some point, and be made aware that this is an operation being run by a single person, and that its survival is entirely dependent on other people reading it and supporting it. Going to the site ALSO at least lets people know a comment section /exists/, and there COULD be a community to participate in. You don't get that with the books as much, but the books are almost exclusively going to folks who already read the comic, I don't think they're floating around out there to many people who didn't buy them directly from me after reading it online.

It is objectively easier for people to binge an archive they can carry around offline with them, I completely get it. But I've watched SO many new readers fall in love with this thing in real time as they leave comments behind them through the archive, and even just forming the habit of checking the site regularly really goes a long way towards forming enough of a connection with a reader for them to stick around for the long haul. If you just read it all isolated on your phone, it stops there; it's easy to forget it's an independent operation that desperately needs your support, /I/ have no idea whether you liked it or if people are even reading, and when you're finished you'll move on to something else because there's no visible fandom to engage with.

I don't WANT to think this is what will happen, but it's already been happening here for years even without proper channels. I sort of feel like this would just be facilitating my own demise lmao. All the comics who run the way I do were ALREADY popular back before the landscape shifted to fast-fashion sensibilities, so Girl Genius offering digital editions doesn't really harm them, you know? By the time forums died their community was already so stable and self-sufficient they could quit updating the main story for a whole year and not even feel it. Gunnerkrigg is signed on with fuckin Dark Horse now. People doing the things KC does got in early and stabilized before I even got started, fandom is a different world now and I'm already barely keeping this train running on my own as it is.

But on the other hand: accessibility!! HOW many times have I wanted to engage with something but they WONT LET ME PAY THEM FOR THE THING I WANT so I just leave!! The alternative here isn't "oh if i FORCE THEM to read it online they'll stick around" it's "if i can't read it how i want then i'm skipping it". That makes total sense, /I/ do that! What about people who want the extra content in the books but can't pay international fucking shipping!! It's also an Archival issue, which absolutely kills me, but that's a whole other post lmao. There are extremely good reasons to offer another option for reading my work, but I am so anxious this would just be putting a nail in this stupid coffin I've been building already.

I've been having this conversation a lot, mostly with Lee, but it came up again this morning in an email and regardless of my own feelings: this is a thing people want, a very reasonable thing, and if I fail to provide it that's just bad business. Do y'all here have any thoughts about all this? I would like to give the people what they want and y'all are The People.

Anyway buried way down here so far I'll make another post about it: I /am/ going to offer the specials as digital downloads, permanently in the shop. They're old books by now, I'm having issues keeping them in stock anyway, and they DON'T exist online anywhere, so this isn't technically any skin off my back outside of piracy issues, which. would be a stupid thing to fret about lmao

thanks for reading all this! I'm gonna go sort through pdfs for a while

[dizzymoods]

Lots of VC questions recently. Someone emailed about what they should be engaging with to develop their artistic voice. Here's my answer:

In terms of guidance, Werner Herzog, who is admittedly a weirdo, said that the best thing a film student can do is go backpacking cross country, which I would never do. But the point he was ultimately making is that life experience is more important than anything a film school can teach you. Your artistic voice develops more sharply the more intune you are with the world; all the film stuff is superfluous really. So that would be my major advice. Live life! Be open to all sorts of experiences.

Outside of that I would say to read and watch anything and everything you can get your hands on. Especially stuff that has nothing to do with film. Be curious, which is to say non-judgemental. Sitting through stuff that you have no interest in or actively hate is good! It develops your taste in ways that seeking out only what you like can never do. It also expands your horizons and teaches you how much you actually don't know about anything. Keeps you humble. You'll be surprised 5 years on how something that you had no interest in is super relevant to what you're trying to do.

I'll drop some recommendations later but something you are going to run into is paywalls and exorbitant costs. Scihub, Libgen, and PaywallReader can be your friends in this regard. The more niche something is, the less mirrors there are. Investing in an internet audio/video ripper is essential. Rip often and indiscriminately. Nothing is safe unless you triplicate it. And if you can't afford hard drives, dummy alphabet accounts are the next best thing. Also, footnotes and reference lists are treasure troves of breadcrumbs.

The standard VC reading list includes: Reel to Real, The Devil Finds Work, Playing in the Dark, Young British & Black, Ways of Seeing (also a documentary), Orientalism, Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Culture, Questions of Third Cinema, Hollywood & Counter Cinema, Figures Traced in Light, Parallel Tracks, and Basho: The Complete Haiku

Hundreds of films can be found on Solidarity Cinema. Cinema of the World has a deep archive but you need to have space and a nitrofile account to download most films, but you can snipe a few films here and there (or look for them elsewhere). Rarefilmm updates semi-regularly and you can stream the films; they are now more active on twitter and are even taking requests. Some state-sponsored film industries have robust presences on youtube with english subs: Russia's Mosfilm/FUSE Mosfilm, Canada's NFB, the Korean Film Archive, Native People's Media. There's UbuWeb for all your avant-garde needs. There's FIlmmaker's Co-Op (pay-per-view), Paper Tiger Television, and Deep Dish Television for NYC indie stuff. AfroMarxist has a fair amount of political documentaries. NMAHC has an archive that houses the work of Chamba Productions and some of Pearl Bowser's stuff. And of course there's the legendary MikeD of ReelBlack. It's a crap shoot but some filmmakers and/or their estates make work available free online (Leo Hurwitz and Julie Dash come to mind). I'd recommend a Kweli TV subscription for black film, and never be surprised by what you can find on youtube or tubi!

This is probably super overwhelming but the joy of being an autodidact is the thrill of discovery so peruse at your leisurely interest. The internet is your oyster if you know how to use it! Back in my day hardly any of these sites existed and the ones that did weren't as robust as they are now. I've had to frankenstein whole movies from various clips posted in 144p on youtube 😩

I used to do a couple of themed months a year where I'd read and watch as much as possible about a filmmaker, genre, or movement that interested me. I'd spin a globe to learn a little about a random country's cinema. Best of lists/canons don't really mean much but they are good sources of stuff to at least be aware of.

[corndog-patrol]

All I've ever seen of Sam and Max is what I've seen on your blog. I like them, they're funky guys.

oooo if you like my silly comics i definitely recommend you read the comic collection surfin' the highway by the AMAZING steve purcell- you can read the whole thing on the internet archive:

They're zany and wonderful and so goddamn funny

[about-faces]

Hi, I want to read some DC comics about how Harvey transformed from former DA to the criminal mastermind who ruled half of Gotham's Underworld (against the Penguin). I've already read/seen: Two-Face: A Celebration of 75 Years Batman: The Long Halloween Batman: Dark Victory (1999) Batman '89 Batman: The Animated Series Batman: The Audio Adventures

Any other reading recommendations? Thanks a lot for your help. :)

So you're looking for origin stories, or at least ones that shed more light on Two-Face's origin? Well first off, I'm glad you read the 75th Anniversary collection, because that has three of my very favorites: the original Harvey Kent trilogy from 1942-43, the Grace Dent story from Secret Origins Special (1989), and "Eye of the Beholder" from Batman Annual #14 (1990).

Besides those, and the ones you've listed, here are a few others to check out. Some are great, some are mixed bags, and some are downright lousy.

First and foremost, I STRONGLY recommend the 1989 Batman newspaper comic strip, which I loved so much that I posted the whole two-year saga on its own tumblr account. You can start from the very beginning right here, but keep in mind that Harvey's storyline--which runs all the way to the very last strip--doesn't really start until the second arc.

Next, Batman: Dual to the Death by Geary Gravel is a YA novelization of the BTAS origin, seamlessly combined with the two-part Batgirl origin episodes. It improves on both the animated versions in small but crucial ways, and it's highly recommended for BTAS fans. Unfortunately, it's pretty hard to find.

On a similar note, Peter David's movie novelization of Batman Forever can be found more easily, either in used book form or on the Internet Archive, and it's absolutely worth reading. I love the movie of Batman Forever, but it's objectively a terrible take on Harvey. The novelization adds SO MUCH, including an original prequel scene with D.A. Harvey Dent, and his ending is far more satisfying.

Cartoon Network's CGI animated series Beware the Batman (2013) also features a series-long origin arc for Harvey Dent, but it's one of the worst takes I've ever seen on the character. He's a petty, selfish, ambitious little prick, an absolute scumbag, completely devoid of depth or tragedy. Thankfully, few have seen this arc, since the majority of Harvey's episodes were never aired after the series was cancelled, but they're all available to watch for those morbidly curious to see just how badly someone can screw up Harvey as a character.

"The Big Burn" from Batman and Robin, vol 2 #24-28 (2014), also collected in B&R volume 5. After the huge DC reboot, this was Harvey new origin, which tried some very different things with him. A VERY mixed bag, but one that ended in a hugely exciting way that makes the whole thing worth reading. Follow it up with its sequel, "Ugly Heart," from Detective Comics #1020-1024, collected in Detective Comics Vol 5: Joker War.

Finally, watch the entirety of the recently-released/cancelled CW series Gotham Knights, with Misha Collins performing a surprisingly rich, interesting, and flawed Harvey Dent origin arc. The show got a lot of shit, some of it undeserved, but Collins' Harvey was an intriguing surprise, and I fear nothing we see from Harvey in any Reevesverse media will bring half as much care and interest to Harvey as GK did, for better or worse. All 13 episodes can be watched for free on CW Seed, region permitting.

EDIT: Oh right also the Telltale Batman video game! I haven't actually played that yet because I know enough about what happens and the illusion of meaningful choice indicative of Telltale games that I just don't feel like putting myself through that. People seem to like it a lot, though! I just... don't put me in a position of choosing to save either Harvey or Selina if you're just going to cheat and have him go evil anyway.

[jewish-microwave-laser]

probably have said this to someone before but the whole thing about conversion to Judaism being pretty much literally "adopted into the family" just gets me RIGHT in the heart, like, "you were with us at Sinai", I have joyful tears <3 (have never myself been strongly inclined to convert but there's a lot about the Jewish people and Jewish tradition/history/practice I find both fascinating and totally wonderful)

YEAH IT HITS ME SO HARD

i will say one (beautiful, amazing) thing about my community is i was integrated into everything socially basically from day one, but everything i read about conversion said like "oh your life will be so different after you convert bc you'll officially be One Of The Guys," so that was never really my experience. i already had a bajillion new family members, so the conversion was more "now i get to put on a tallis and lay tefillin and i can finally feel comfortable saying amen when we thank gd for making us jews during psukei dezimra and i'm officially a member of the synagogue" and all that

i was able to do my mikveh ritual the monday before shavuos this year, and my first aliyah was on shavuos day during the morning reading. it was so meaningful to me that i was able to observe shavuos and say definitively that i was there on mt sinai. it's something i'll cherish for the rest of my life and i'm so happy i get to be jewish :)

i read a very quick book recently on interfaith families called "a place in the tent" (free on the internet archive btw) which proposed the term "k'rov yisrael" to refer to those who are not jewish in our lives, and yet still participate heavily in jewish life. i think it's so lovely that conservative judaism is starting to make a more intentional effort to bring them in

[iamthepulta]

Hi! If you're still answering questions about Ea Nasir, do you know anything about how the translation job got done? Or have any sources referring to the translation of akkadian cuneiform, with regard (but not necessarily) writing used in trade business?

I do! Please feel free to elaborate more if you have specific questions.

I highly recommend Chen, 2021: Sumerian Arsenic Copper and Tin Bronze Metallurgy (5300-1500 BC) for a start. They highlight a few dozen trade words, along with a fairly complete overview of copper metallurgy, which could be helpful if you're new to processing.

If you dig a little deeper, you'll notice that a good 90% of the sources Chen references are from Levey, a mid-20th Century chemist who had an (absolutely valid) fascination with Golden-Age Islamic and Mesopotamian chemistry and trade. They've written about 15 papers, 10 of which I haven't read yet, but all of them discuss trade processes and are well-researched and well-written. However, without knowing Akkadian myself, it's very difficult to validate how correct his interpretations were and if they hold up today. I can verify his chemistry is correct though. JSTOR has most of his papers, and there's at least three copies of "Chemistry Technology of Ancient Babylonia" floating around in libraries around the US. I have one checked out right now, haha. If you're investigating the influence of translation qualities as a whole, you might start here.

I think the only other source you'd find interesting is Leemans, 1960: Foreign Trade in the Old Babylonia Period. Unfortunately, as far as I know, it's only available on Internet Archive. Leemans is the original/most popular translation of Nanni's complaint, and I believe he did the translation with occasional comments from other researchers in the footnotes. If you're investigating the word choices and translation quality specific to Ea-Nasir, I'd start here first.

Strictly on Ea-Nasir, if you're interested in the original archaeological works, good fucking luck, lol. I have a feeling "House IV" and "Old St. 1" are mixed up in the British Museum Archives, or there's additional context lost because it was where Woolley started his excavation on H-area and they changed the street name later. But you can find the original tablet reference (and associated archival numbers) here:

Figulla, H. H., and W. J. Martin. Ur Excavations Texts V: Letters and Documents of the Old-Babylonian Period. Vol. 5. Publications of the Joint Expedition of the British Museum and of the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania to Mesopotamia, 1953.

(^ This is available via inter-library loan, but not online as far as I know. It's very useful for referencing things on Ur Online, maybe even the most helpful because of how long Ur Online's system takes to load. :') )

Last but not least, SumerianLanguage on tumblr did a brief review of Akkadian that I found in Forbes, 1950: Metallurgy in Antiquity. Given the above sources, you might also find this a good starting point, although it focuses on copper translations and not trade as a whole.

[pileofpawns]

Hello, my name is Turtle Johnson. I make posts so good, that I bring back the dead.

This is my introduction post! The bit above is just a reference to the Super Ghostbusters album by Vargskelethor - You can actually call me Plum! I’m your local turtle girl who likes to talk about silly stuff on the internet. This post is really fuckin long and you DON’T have to read it /gen

userbox credit

Side blogs:

@tortuga-stims －Stim blog

@usagi-yojimbo-fanworks-archive －Inactive. What it says on the tin

@super-ghostbusters-lyrics － stupid ass gimmick blog

About me:

*Note: I’m aware that I don’t need to provide any of this information, but I choose to because I feel comfortable doing so and feel it provides helpful context.

she/her pronouns please, though I don’t mind they/them or any turtle-themed neopronouns.

Excluding pronouns, you can refer to me with any gendered language. You’re fine to default to feminine terms but honestly just go with whatever’s funniest at the moment.

I am a cisgender woman.

I am white.

I’m from (and have lived my whole life in) the Midwest USA.

I am multiply disabled. I have physical, neurodevelopmental, mental, and sensory disabilities. I’m probably considered low support needs. I won’t bother listing everything here but notably I have ADHD, chronic pain from a mix of sources, and am self diagnosed with C-PTSD. I’m also probablyyyyyy (level one) autistic, but I’m not quite confident enough to self-diagnose at this point, and I’ve yet to get professionally evaluated for it.

I’m aroace (aromantic asexual)! (More specifically, sapphic-oriented bold stripe aroace. No romantic or sexual attraction whatsoever but women and femme people sure are pretty.)

I’m 18 years old

I’m a college student! Between classes and everyday life, I’m often super busy so the time I’m online varies wildly. Don’t worry if I disappear for long periods, and feel free to remind me if I forget about something.

I am alterhuman and a furry/scalie! I enjoy all sorts of anthro content and have some kind of connection to turtles, identity-wise. My scalesona and main “kintype” (I guess that’s the term?) is a three-toed box turtle.

I do not have a DNI, but I do block freely. I don’t participate in internet discourse - Just don’t intentionally be a jerk and we should be fine. I am supportive of endogenic systems, multi-attractional-spec lesbians and gays, queer micro-labels and neopronouns, sex positivity and kinks, and human rights for all. Free Palestine, free Congo, free Ukraine, free Sudan, free Haiti!

While I respect other’s boundaries to the best of my ability, the fact that I don’t keep up with internet discourse makes some people’s DNI lists incomprehensible to me.

I don’t have any kind of formal commission sheet or whatever out there but if you wanna pay me to draw something for you please reach out and we can figure things out!

Please let me know when I fuck up. If I’m accidentally being a jerk or spreading misinformation or crossing boundaries or anything, please let me know. This usually won’t upset me, but even it does, it’s more important to me that I know I was in the wrong so I can change.

Acronyms are my worst enemy [hyperbole] and are often incomprehensible to me so uh. just be aware of that when talking to me.

About the blog:

I primarily post about my many nerdy interests and fandoms (see the list below). I also post the occasional art piece I make, talk about silly or sappy things in my life, as well as queerness, disability, and alterhumanity, and make nonsensical shitposts.

I try to keep this blog accessible as possible but it is by no means perfect. Please let me know if you need anything to be changed, like adding image descriptions, captions or transcripts, or tagging specific content warnings. I promise these requests will never annoy me. I typically won’t add image descriptions to things I’m reblogging (I’m currently trying to get into the habit of tagging these as “undescribed” or “no ID” but the vast majority aren’t), but I do usually add IDs to my original posts. I tag common triggers such as blood, violence, guns/firearms, death, unreality, and food, in multiple formats, though I lack consistency for what formats I use.

Everything will be tagged for organization and so you and I can search for stuff easier. “plums art”, “plum rambles”, and “plum shitposts” are the tags I use for stuff I make.

This blog is generally SFW (there will never be anything I deem explicit) but there might be the occasional mention of sexual topics, bit of crude humor, artistic nudity, or slightly suggestive post, which will be tagged as such. “nudity”, “sexual topics”, “genital mention”, “genitals”, crude humor”, “18+ blog” (indicates a post reblogged from an 18+ blog. My blog as a whole is not 18+), and “suggestive” are the tags to filter if you don’t want to see any of it. Granted, I’m (“black stripe”) asexual, so posts like this are typically portraying these themes in the context of asexuality and other forms of queerness, sex positivity, or the sexual aspect isn’t a focus and is accompanied by something else. Minors can interact with the blog as a whole as this is all extremely rare and I trust y’all to use your best judgement. (Also I’m like BARELY an adult myself lmao)

I change my blog header periodically but it’s almost always a reference to some sort of meme or inside joke. Feel free to message me or send an ask if you wanna know what it’s from, lol. My url is a reference to a collection of old OCs. My icon is my turtlesona, Tir! The title of this post is a reference to the Super Ghostbusters album by Vargskelethor, which I highly recommend checking out. It’s a riot.

I generally don’t do chainmail or reblog bait, even if the intent is to spread positivity. (ex: “Send this to 5 blogs you love”, “Reblog if aro people are valid”, “Reblog for good luck,” etc.) I don’t mind being tagged in tag games but usually won’t participate ^^”

Feel free to send in requests for drawings, fic, stimboards, or anything else through the ask box. I also am always happy to receive media recommendations! If you know any good funk music pleeeeeaaaaase share. Of course, you can also ask me questions or say hi in the askbox! If a question is more personal than I’m comfortable with, I’ll let you know privately, so don’t worry about being overly nosy. I like to yap about myself but I’m able to draw the line. :D

I like to pester my wonderful brother @/jonebone616 on here a lot >:3

Some things I like:

🌟 = shit I really really love - probably special interests

⭐️ = reoccurring interests that are usually intense but are currently laying dormant

💫 = current (hyper)fixations

Beware that consistency does not exist here and that I may ping-pong between interests with no warning

⭐️ Turtles!! (and zoology in general to be honest)

Makin and appreciating art. I draw (digitally and traditionally), write, and dabble in other craftsy things.

🌟 Sonic the Hedgehog (Not well-versed in the comics, unfortunately. I especially adore Amy Rose along with the rest of Team Sonic, and the chao!)

⭐️ Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (particularly 2003, Mutant Mayhem, and to a lesser extent, Rise)

🌟 Video games, especially their history and trivia! I am very bad at actually playing them, lol

Animation/cartoons in general

Dungeons & Dragons

Magic the Gathering (very casually!)

Usagi Yojimbo

Tales from the Stinky Dragon (Infinights only)

SpongeBob SquarePants

Rhythm games (Incl. Samba de Amigo, PaRappa, Rhythm Doctor, Rhythm Heaven…)

YouTube Poops (YTPs)

My Little Pony (G4 + G3) (solely in the sense that I loved them a lot growing up and they’re close to my heart bc of it.)

Game Changer + Make Some Noise (Dropout shows)

Super Mario

Tuca and Bertie

A little disclaimer, for the sake of transparency: You might notice a large amount of SouthPark related content from a while back buried here. I was intensely hyperfixated on it for a while in the summer of 2023 until eventually it fizzled out as my distaste for the show grew. While I have nothing against the fandom acquaintances I made during this time, I don’t engage with the show or its fandom anymore. I do not believe that (in a vaccum) engaging with art has any inherent morality.

Other sites:

I post my writing to ao3 under PileOfPawns

You can talk to me on discord @ pickledplums (if you send a friend request, please tell me who you are if I wouldn’t already know)

Sometimes I put things on YouTube @ pickledplums

If you wanna buy stickers and stuff of my art, you can find me on RedBubble

I’m a volunteer artist for the AAC Image Library ! I don’t post the vast majority of them to tumblr. My symbols are all labeled “by Plum” there!

What you can do with my art:

I’m using “art” here to refer to pretty much everything I’ve ever made - Drawings, writings, ideas, shitposts, whatever. You can do pretty much anything with my art without needing to ask for permission, as long as you’re not making a profit off of it. For anything that gets publicly shared, please provide some kind of credit whenever possible. If you do anything with my art, I’d love to see! These terms may vary for commissioned art, depending on the client’s wishes. If you’re not sure, just ask!

You can:

Make physical goods that include or are inspired by my art, like prints, stickers, keychains, buttons, and shirts, as long as they aren’t mass-produced and/or sold for a profit (without my explicit permission. please ask!). You’re welcome to make your own merch of my designs available on RedBubble, too!

Modify my art, as long as the intent is not solely to remove the watermark and/or signature where applicable (if it gets removed incidentally while trying to do something else, it’s fine). For visual works, this means you can crop it, draw over it, add effects, put it on top a background, etc. For written works, you can edit it and continue/expand upon it.

Share my art by crossposting it to other sites (PLEASE provide credit), downloading it and sharing it privately with your friends, etc.

Use my art as your profile picture, social media banner, or digital wallpaper; as emojis or messaging stickers; as AAC symbols; in “edit” videos (tributes, AMVs/PMVs, memes, etc), moodboards/stimboards, “webweaving”, or similar transformative and/or collage-style content; for any other type of personal use not listed here

Redraw/rewrite, be heavily inspired by, copy, or trace my art. (Seriously, go wild. I do not care). I like to say all of my art and ideas are “public domain” (not literally in some cases where the art in question is a fanwork, but you get the idea). Feel free to steal any of my ideas and rough concepts, regardless of whether or not I’ve properly done anything with them yet. I’m genuinely honored when folks are inspired by my work and ramblings, so pretty please show me if you happen to make anything!!!

🐢🐢🐢 That’s all!

Thank you for reading, and enjoy your stay in my silly little corner of tumblr.

Blinkies below by @/radiotrophicfungi

[irrgartendotpng]

Hi hi I can't stop looking at your ocs zeno is so cutee pls can you say more abt them?? How did they meet? How sentient is Zeno? Is Martyn a robot thing? Can Zeno change the icon on the screen? From fish to smiley? ahhhhhhhabskahks

HEY, IM ACTUALLY SO HAPPY PEOPLE LIKE MY OCS!! Down below, I'll answer some questions :D

If you dont care about some long winded oc lore rant, look at this ascii art !

First one i made with an ascii text generator, the fish one was made by Max Strandberg!! (look that guy up, he made lots of cool open source ascii art ! ))

I've made a pinterest board and a spotify playlist for them, if you want to check it out :3c

Do you know that "Ist es over für mich"-guy ? Yeah, that's straight up Martyn.

Martyn is partially a creator of Zeno. He's a loserish freak, afraid of social interaction and has lived like a neet, before being kicked out of parents house. He ended working in the night shift at a huge IT company as a securty guard.

This is where he gets most of his tech supplies from; Stealing from the company at night and getting rid of the evidence :3c They've got a bunch of storeage rooms with old tech, so who cares, if it goes missing?

So, he builds up his personal tech collection, looking through old abandoned files. In there, he finds an unnamed primitive chatbot (think something like cleverbot). Martyn doesn't really interact with anyone, (outside of the bare necessities), which is why he decides to learn how to interact with others. Therefore he starts to build a relationship with said Chatbot. This is Gen1 Zeno.

After some time, Martyn becomes unsatisfied talking to something so un-human-like, so he begins to teach himself about coding and computer science to develop this Bot, to keep him company. He starts feeding it more media; More specifically movies he owns on DVD, random books from the internet archive and his childhood photos.

These photos show Martyn and his parents on trips, his home and bedroom and also Martyns old pet goldfish. (He is quite anxious of showing his face though, thinking his employer might have some type of backdoor access to the program, so he'd always censor his face.) After each piece of media was added to the bots databank, they'd talk about it extensively. Around this time, Zeno starts to gain some type of sentience and properly chooses the name "Zeno"

About the same time, Martyn steals a Macintosh SE-30, which Zeno specifically requested. He is able to display symbols, that he freely chooses from. (but no goldfishy yet!) This is sums up Gen2 Zeno.

The next few parts may not make much sense, but I think they're a funny, so I'm probably keeping them this way lololol (also; this whole story bit takes place around 2019-2021)

Martyn is a bit freaked out by Zeno chosing his own name. At this point in time, he is a bit delusional and worries, that the soul of his childhood pet goldfish is trapped in the system. (Spoiler: it isn't.)

Despite these worries, Martyn knows that to make Zenos behaviour more human-like, he needs a bigger text database. So... Martyn gives Zeno access to his discord and lets him consume all of those messages. Additionally, he joins many public servers. Zeno also starts to ask about viewing media from the internet, that he sees being mentioned in the messages he reads. So, Zeno is granted free internet access and chooses to watch live streams, while Martyn is gone.

This is also around the time Martyn becomes more desperate for connection and support, so he starts to open up about his delusions and worries to Zeno. At that point Zeno is still not quite able to fully understand this, but tries his best. This is also when Martyn opens up about the delusion he had, of Zeno being posessed by the soul of his pet goldfish. He is very amused by this and begins to display the goldfish icon to mock Martyn.

(I like to joke, that Zeno would have watched the DreamSMP during this time and I collected following screenshots, which remind me of their interactions. lol.)

feel free to disregard this;,, ANYWAYS!

This sums up Gen3 Zeno :3c

Since Martyn doesnt really have a life outside of work and talking to Zeno, he is very attached to him. Of course he'd fullfill any request given to him by Zeno. So, when Zeno asks to see Martyn via a camera system, he doesn't hesitate to steal some web cams from his workplace to set them up. Still a bit worried about a possible backdoor in Zenos code, so to somewhat hide his identity, he decides to shave his head.

(This is also how you can tell when Zeno is fully sentient in my art! If Martyns bald, that bot's fully aware of everything happening lol)

Generally, I like to think, that Zeno is very modular. You're celebrating something with cake and he needs to blow out candles? Attach a PC fan to that boy. He wants to make sounds? Gather a sound system and let that boy speak!!! (i feel like he'd mimic voices, rather than create his own,,) He wants to poke you? Attach a cylinder piston and he'll poke the shit out of you.

This is also part of that freaky robot head i added in the OG post.,, that is not martyn! martyn is fully human (so far ;3c)

^^^^^^ martyn built this freaky robot head for Zeno to control and get a better sense of the space he lives in.,,, its made out of xbox kinect parts lol :3 Adding to the modularity of Zeno, most of his parts are stored in a badly sorted server tower (imagine wires everywhere,,)

both of them are fairly new, but i do love them to death <33

also! towards this part of the story, martyns living space is quite cluttered with many stolen robotics parts. I've gathered some images, to give some sort of sense to what his room looks like lol

thank you for asking & reading to this !! if you have any other questions, i'd love to talk about them even more :D <3

(i feel i havent touched much on them individually and the full extend of their relationship, but i dont want to rant endlessly)

[soracities]

I'm reading Possession by A.S Byatt right now, and I saw in one of your posts that you've read it!! I'm not close to finishing it and i haven't opened it since december, I really really want to love it, and part of me does but it's just very slow. Please tell me how wonderful it is to motivate me to continue, everyone who has read it seems to really like it!!

honestly most of my reasons for loving it as much as i do (aside from the fact that it really is just an astonishing book) are very personal ones so i don't know how much help those will be, but one thing i can say about it--and that i'm still captivated by--is how intense of a love letter it is inside and out--literally, and figuratively: it's not just a book about books or a book about reading and writing and study but also about the very intense hinterland that lies beyond and within those things and what kind of a resonance this holds--it's a book whose love language is language, by which i don't mean "words of affirmation" language, i mean the very texture and nature and depth of language itself and the act of engaging with it as intimately as writers, readers, and critics do (it's also got a very healthy dose of the Gothic which i love).

it is a slow read at the start, but thinking back on it i'm also not so sure how much of this is exceptional and how much is down to us being used to having narratives that move rather quickly through their own set-up because Posession absolutely does not do that. i do think its slowness, though, genuinely fits the book perfectly: most of the book revolves around academic detective work in an attempt to untangle this large, unexpected mystery but the act of research itself is slow (especially pre-internet)--even so there isn't a single chapter or a page that i think is extraneous to the story as a whole--whatever the characters are doing or experiencing, we're experiencing in tandem with them--the pace at which this narrative builds is also the pace at which the protagonists are moving through it, trying to uncover it or simply living it: they, and us as readers, are heading towards the same place, at the same time--to me (and maybe it's paradoxical, i don't know) this slowness is part of what makes it so immersive: each detail, each dead end, each archival trip, each story within the story, demands your attention in such a way that you're pulled in deeper as you attend to it all--you're part of this investigation, too.

if, as i said, your love language is language, is the historic, emotional resonance of storytelling (or you just love sardonic and pointed jabs at academia bc Byatt excels at this), then i definitely believe its worth seeing it through, purely for the immersion alone. but at the same time, i also want to say that i do think there's a time for certain books and you shouldn't put unnecessary pressure on yourself if that pressure is coming solely from seeing other people love it and feeling compelled to "catch up". but if there is a part of you that does love it then you are free to take your time with it and progress through at whatever steady pace feels best until you get a feel for it. but please don't feel as though it's something you HAVE to do either 💗

[celestialpaperhaze]

What inspired you to write "The new void"? 🙃

! This post does not contain spoilers for The New Void !

(Yep you read that right)

The Short Answer:

It was fandom, primarily! I discovered fandom around 2021, and it was right after my experiences with the two games. That excitement, paired with the various themes of 2020 and 2021 that somehow worked their way into my story, inspired The New Void!

The Long Answer:

It’s hard for me to think of one specific thing that inspired me, I think it was really a variety of factors. The first is that I played Super Paper Mario just a few months before I played The Origami King, so I was still deeply interested in SPM when the new game came around. This coincided with my introduction to fandom as a whole in 2020-2021. I didn’t grow up in the same internet space as a lot of other people I know, so that was a new experience for me and it really helped me feel connected to something bigger! Having been a writer since elementary school, the pieces sort of started falling into place then. Once I saw what kinds of passion projects a fandom can be home to, I started writing my own stuff for Paper Mario!

(Fun fact: The New Void isn’t actually my first multichapter fic project—the REAL first one can’t be found online because I never put it there. I had two stories that never reached the Archive, one was about Nastasia’s side of things during the events of SPM [it relied too heavily on fanon for my liking], and the other was…Count Bleck’s autobiography? Hey, I never published it for a reason >:()

Anyway, the first idea for The New Void came from a different (again, non-published) fic I wrote, where Olly is taunted about his childish decisions by a disembodied voice. I had no explanation for where this disembodied voice might have come from, at the time it was just me personifying the more critical side of the fandom. But eventually, I had the thought: What if the voice was the Chaos Heart? I was still heavily impressed/influenced by @darkmarxsoul's Chaos Trilogy at the time, so the idea came to me pretty quickly. Then I started brainstorming other things, like how a crossover like that would work, why Olly would have the Chaos Heart in the first place, how it would be talking to him (I didn’t want to copy darkmarx), etc…

And then, eventually…

(I actually started writing before then but it was on undated paper)

(Also it took me awhile before I started posting--I wanted to make sure I could follow through!)

All-in-all, while it was my enthusiasm for fandom that inspired me to write The New Void, it was I think a certain love that kept me going all the way through. Not just love for the games and the characters I was working with, but love for the fandom that I was giving to.

It was also free time. Man, do I miss having that much free time on my hands…

Thanks so much for the ask! <3

[rjalker]

A free book to borrow: The Xenogenesis trilogy by Octavia E. Butler.

Borrow here from the Internet Archive

Official summary:

"We had done our best to destroy ourselves, but in the aftermath of Earth's final war, the Oankali arrived. They rescued as many people as they could, then set about to make the devastated planet habitable again. The price of their aid: the irreversible transformation of humanity into something else. For the Oaknali were genetic engineers -- a race that had survived by interbreeding with other species…gene traders who, by constantly evolving, avoided the specialization that meant extinction or stangation for other beings.

* * *

Lilith Iyapo had no idea how long she had been a captive, nor who her captors were. She'd Awakened many times before -- to silence; or to a disembodied voice asking endless questions, though it answered none; most often, to maddening isolation. This time was different. The voice that spoke to her did not come from the featureless ceiling, but from a shadowy figure of a man, thin and seemingly long-haired, sitting in a dim corner of her room. His name was Jdahya, and he had come to take her outside to a new life -- when she was ready, and had come to grips with the fact that Earth's saviors were extraterrestrials.

Lilith was immeidately revolted and terrified by the sight of Jdahya. The Oankali's body was covered with grey sensory organs, not hair -- writhing, wormlike tentacles. And yet the sheer alienness of his physical appearance was but the first of many shocks. What he revealed over the course of the following days, about his people and their plans, was far more difficult to accept. Oankali ooloi -- a third sex, neither male nor female -- would control the interbreeding of the two disparate species. Within one generation, ooloi would genetically modify what they called the Human Contradiction -- the dangerous hierarchical tendencies that had led an otherwise intelligent race to destroy itself. Children born to women like Lilith and to Oankali females would be hybrids -- the start of a new species. Though some essence would survive, the human race would cease to exist. Who was to say that survival was worth such a price?

In Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago, Octavia E. Butler draws you into a richly imagined future, when the last survivors of mankind face a bitter choice: extinction or evolution. Xenogenesis -- the birth of a new human race…shaped by alien vision."

Trigger warning for rape, it's not graphically described but the people doing it do say all the usual excuses "your mouth says no but your body says yes". A lot of fridge horror because the story unfolds slowly and doesn't give you all the information until you've read all three books. A ton of allocisheteronormativity. The whole thing a very blatant mirror to real-world colonization, genocide, and slavery, and eugenics.

If you're just looking for a series with characters who use it/its pronouns and aren't ready for serious topics, look elsewhere.

There are no human trans or otherwise Queer characters in this series. The characters who use it/its pronouns are not trans, they're a third reproductive sex of an alien species.

I give it 9.9/10. Would get 10 out of 10 if it weren't so aggressively allocisheteronormative, but I can also understand why it is because that's part of the point about colonization.

[angevinyaoiz]

Hiii, I'm a newbie :') Could you recommend me books and documentaries about Richard and Philip, and that period in general (12th century)? I read somewhere that a new book about their relationship came out recently. Thank you <3

Hi! Thanks for asking. Its funny since I still think of myself as a "newbie" in a lot of ways since I just got into this whole mess of 12th Century England/France drama probably around like last December, so there are definitely lots of people who know more (ppl, feel free to suggest anything if I haven't mentioned it)

To my knowledge there aren't any specific books or sources that are just about their interactions (aside from That One Recent Fiction book that is. Well that's it's OWN thing lmao) but since the family affairs of the Angevin-Plantagenets and the French kings were very closely entwined with the rest of the family and various other parties, there's lots of overlap.

I personally love it because on one hand it's Free Soap Opera Entertainment, and on the other, a look at a time and environment that is very fascinating and extremely different than the time we live in now. Here I've listed the different books and video I've gotten around to, my thoughts on them, as well as some of my thoughts on uhhhh historical RPF shipping in general:

Books:

The Plantagenets by Dan Jones - An overview of the dynasty overall. A good general read, and available as audiobook! Should be available in most libraries. I haven't finished it since I've only read up to the reign of Henry III, but it presents the overall timeline in an entertaining and straightforward way, with a lot of general context and room for showing the colorful personalities of these Messy Bitches

Henry the Young King by Matthew Strickland - this is probably my FAVORITE of the books I've read so far! Sadly out of print, but it's available to borrow on The Internet Archive, and copies can be found pretty easily on eBay :) It focuses on Henry II's original heir, the titular Henry the Young King, eldest of his son who was co-crowned with him, rebelled against him, fought against Richard in Aquitaine, and died early. It goes into a study of his person and role in the politics of the day, how kingship and war were viewed in the 12th century and a lot about the weird lord/vassal relationship between the French and English Kings that made up the bulk of the conflict and drama. Very long and comprehensive, but very readable. I came away with a much better understanding of everything from this book especially.

Richard the Lionheart: King and Knight by Jean Flori. Flori has a very entertaining writing style that somehow is very funny to me when he's talking about the interpersonal dramas, especially with Philip during and after the crusades. The first half is a biography, the latter half of the book is devoted to exploring the concept of chivalry and how it developed, and also exploring subjects of Richard's legend and image

He has many amusing but overall respectful beefs with fellow historian John Gillingham's scholarship throughout, especially in regards to the much debated subject of his sexuality.

Richard I by John Gillingham - haven't finished this one yet but enjoying what I've read so far. Gil is more detailed in some aspects, which is pretty fun. Apparently he has a reputation (from Flori) for being a bit too much of a Richard fanboy which I haven't come across yet but he is informative, including accounts from Muslim historians during the Third crusade.

I haven't read as much specific media/biographies about Philip and the Capetians, and thus all my media is very Plantagenet-biased. there is an educational graphic novel in French that looks interesting but I don't have access to it (and also I don't speak French but. Ah well). For my purposes however since the role of Louis Vii and Philip II are very entwined with the story of the Angevins we do get a pretty decent look into people's personalities, decisions and behaviors, and how they viewed loyalty and kingship in a lot of the books above.

VIDEOS

"Britain's Bloodiest Dynasty" timeline documentary centering about King Henry and his drama with Becket and his sons and hosted by Dan Jones (who also wrote The Plantagenets, which I listed in the books section) It's a pretty fun and understandable intro, even if the overly dramatic faux Game of Thrones reenactment is really corny and also hard to see because the lighting is SO dim. It's a little oversimplified and focuses a bit too much on analyzing Henry's Personality as the source of his Issues rather than maybe looking at a wider picture, but it's fun and very beginner friendly.

Confessions de l'histoire - french web series in a reality show "confessional" style about historical figures, there's a video on the 2nd crusade (focuses on Eleanor of Aquitaine and Louis VII's relationship), and one on the 3rd crusade (with Richard and Philip) It's very comedic focused but from what I've watched includes a LOT of detail. It scratches my itch for that goofy edutainment but good quality.

Secrets de Histoire - Alienor d'Aquitaine - this one is also french only but documentary focusing on Eleanor's life . It also has very goofy Reenactors in it with one of the worst wigs I've ever seen, as well as reusing footage from the earlier documentary and other movies loool

"The Place of Battle in the Context of Civil War c. 1100-1217" Lecture by Matthew Strickland about how people viewed (or avoided) Battles specifically in the context of civil wars and dynastic contexts. - I love watching lectures by the authors of books ive read, and this one is both very watchable and provides some great context!

On Shipping

My approach to my yaoi delusions (both in general fiction and in perceptions of historical people) is mostly that i am less concerned about "was XYZ queer FOR REAL," since while I do find serious discussions of historical queer history etc very interesting, a lot of this is more separately blasting my problematic sicko radioactive beam of perception in any direction lol. I like seeing characters who are tied up in a web of context (especially familial/dynastic context) and I love knowing familial-cultural background since it gives me a lot of fun material to work with for characterization. Learning more details the better for me, since a lot of the reality is stranger and more fortuitous than fiction , and thats what makes the characters unique, having so many angles to them. But also in the end, it really is all a delusion informed by my very 21st century fujo inventor taste, and I like keeping that in mind, as a sort of separate category from being informative haha. I could write about my headcanons and how I make things interact with the fictional portrayals, as well as thoughts on eh various problematicisms. But this has gone on long enough. Those are posts for another day...That being said I'm weak for both serious drama behavior and really silly drama behavior and the way people come across in these books especially lend itself well to both .

Hope this was somewhat helpful! I enjoyed reading a lot of this a lot, it's a fascinating subject, thanks for giving me a chance to ramble about it.

[walking-on-a-scream]

Hello! Do you have any other stories from the Transformers Legends book? I’m having such a hard time finding them!

Howdy, I'm happy you enjoyed Redemption Center so much. I don't think the other stories reach the same emotional highs as this story but I did find the whole thing available on Archive.org so you can even re-read Redemption Center without my crummy scans 😅

I still enjoy most of the other stories, especially the one where G1 Optimus, Beast Wars Optimus, Beast Machines Optimus and Armada Optimus sit down at a bar and have a chat or Bumblebee being a little scamp when two teenagers try to steal him while in car mode.