#you have SO many other options who actually do have the dynamic youre projecting

[faerociousbeast]

hmmmm.hmmhmhmhmhmhmmmmmmm i think ive figured it out

[redbatchedcumbermayned]

I have recorded different versions of my name, and the last time I was told it was Haynrix and I was like, really? Haynrix? - Interviewing Chris Tester part 3

We contiune talking about the transformative power of fanworks, a bit more about romancing Heinrix, how Heinrix is pronounced actually, what a dream come through project would be for Chris and why a stage production of Crime and Punishment was his most memorable work to date and his newly discovered interest in playing D&D.

Part 1 of the interview

Part 2 of the interview

This is the final part of the interview. Thank you so much for reading and listening! (the audio quality is not spectacular but tumblr limits uploads to 10MB). If you quote or reshare, please quote me as the original source.

F: It's very transformative. You take a game and you get your own stories after the game or with the people you interact with. It's very creative. Because Heinrix is very much an archetype, as you said, he has this duality about this very authoritative man with so much trauma underneath. There is a lot to explore, and that speaks for Olga's writing as well, because only a very well written character would draw you in like that into a story.

CT: I mean, it's a crazy balancing act, definitely. And at any time, it could close off, you shut him down, or he shuts you down. And you're like, Oh, okay.

F: And it was incredibly funny that the first romance lines straddled the line between workplace harassment and flirting. And he is so unnerved and then it doesn't like to cordon you off and say, well, you were too aggressive. Game over. 

CT: Yeah.

You can switch to this closeness path like in a real relationship, you are maybe very flirty, very teasy at the beginning, and then things get real and you get real and it changes. And that was very dynamic. I never experienced that before. BioWare writes great romances, but they are often very one note in their games.

CT: And there's still the kind of like, okay, so are we sleeping together? Yeah. Or we do not. All right. No, okay, great, fine. God, I had to go through all the different fucking options just to go like, Is this, is that, no, no, okay, fine, right, yeah. So in terms of nuance and dynamic, it's you've got your issues over there, but regardless, can I just say the right thing? Uh, or not, you know, or be pure, or whatever. Garrus was always a favourite for me.

F: Oh yeah, Garrus, Garrus is great.

CT: Yeah, yeah. I'll be honest I didn't really appreciate quite how subtly all of the pieces are put together until I played through bits of the game and watched bits of the game afterwards [this relates to Rogue Trader]. Because there are so many different moving parts, but also so much is recorded out of order, it's very difficult to get a full appreciation of the whole, and it's the credit of the directors to just be able to give you enough for you to get it in two or three takes, because we gotta move on because time is money is time. 

And so that's kind of crazy, where you've got to just act in faith in the moment and trust that the people who are listening on the other end feel as if they're getting what they need. Obviously the more you record, the more you get a sense of what the character is about and the palette and the playfulness and all of those kinds of things. But because there are such a multitude of choices anyway, no one can explain to you exactly the context of what it is because that's all such a movable feast as it is anyway.

F: That's a huge credit to voice actors to still get it right in three or four takes.

CT: Well, the aim is to give them options so that they can trial it out and be able to have a playfulness about things. It's always nice when you go like, I'm just going to try this different take on how this might traditionally be read as or something, and then you maybe hear that in the game and go like: Oh, okay, that's a little bit of whatever. 

Because quite often you'll probably be told to read a line no more than three times, and the first time that you read a line, that you read it out loud is the first time that you read the line at all. So, you don't read it in advance, and sometimes that goes in. It's normally the second or third take, I would say, but that depends very much on the voice actor. Because quite often, the whole point is to be quite good at sight reading, and sometimes there's a spontaneity in the reading of something for the very first time, which might give something a little bit unexpected, or a little bit fresher. 

And then you realise halfway through, there's a word I have no idea how to pronounce. Is it von Valancius? Von Valancius as it's written or von Valen and you're just like, the hell? Okay. And then you need to go back.

F: Or his name actually, because as a German, we have Heinrich as a first name. So is it Haynrix? Is this Hainrix? But we can say it's Low Gothic, so it doesn't matter.

CT: I have recorded different versions of my name, and the last time I was told it was Haynrix and I was like, really? Haynrix? Okay. Sure? But I've not had a definitive conversation about that, so I don’t know whether or not they change it or, or whatever.

F: I settled on, it's Low Gothic and not the German version and it's fine because that's a fantasy language. It doesn't matter. And I know from other voice actors that sometimes you don't get any directions on how something is pronounced.

CT: Quite often we're just taking an educated guess. I mean, they're very good in terms of some pronunciations, but if no other character is saying this word except you, then there's probably not a guide for it in which case you just make sure that you record it somewhere. So, it's consistent. So, if you're saying it more than once, at least you're saying it wrong consistently. So that becomes the new, right?

F: What was your most memorable work to date? Stage or voice acting?

CT: Stage or voice acting or whatever? God, I would say one was a production of Crime and Punishment. There you go. It was a three-person adaptation of the massive book really condensed into about 90 minutes, essentially. Quite a radical adaptation, but it was a beautifully written adaptation, and I think I did it probably about 2017, 2018. That was wonderful storytelling because it had so much of the original flavour in it and also this ambiguity of character. A much more ambiguous character than someone like Heinrix. Someone who is so eminently fallible and flawed, and yet trying to find a through line through it and a making of sense and the justification for the reasons why people do bad things. That is pretty iconic for me as an experience. 

I do feel lucky that a lot of the things that I'm able to explore in the video game or in the voiceover world generally are completely new and unexpected things. Whereas on stage, unless you're doing a lot of new writing, the vast majority of the time, it's a role that you're familiar with or have seen or have heard about. It's pre-existing. Whereas with some of these video games, you get to create that whole original world or character and that kind of stuff. Which is why if anybody asks me, what role do you want to play? I'm like, the role that I don't know exists yet, and Heinrix is very much one of those. Like, I had no idea and neither did I have any idea that it would develop in the way that it did. 

But the whole process itself is a lot of fun and you work with very cool people to tell a completely new and original story. But having that ambiguity, having that tension within the character, every actor has to find that for themselves anyway, just to keep creatively engaged and alive, but have that so vividly running as an undercurrent and for it to be able to go in different ways, that's such a cool kind of thing. I'm just so up for more of those kinds of opportunities. Maybe hopefully in the future, we'll see.

F: Has voicing Heinrix opened any doors? Did you notice an uptake in offers?

CT: I think it means that a few more people probably know who I am, and that's cool. A few more people. Yeah, it's definitely been referred to. Other than that, I don't know. But it certainly doesn't hurt being involved in such a high profile and well respected, well-loved game. I mean, for me as well, because I've done various different aspects of stuff in that world. That doesn't hurt. 

I love the whole Warhammer 40k universe, at the same time I don't want to just be like, I'm a 40k actor and that's all I do because that world also probably doesn't need just another white middle-class man in it, even if that is like 70 percent of the world. Like you say, they're trying to broaden it out and diversify it and necessarily if it wants to get to a bigger audience and have a healthier ecology on so many different kinds of levels. So, I don't want to go all in on just that, even if it's a very rich world. So, it was a real pleasure. 

F: Would you want to broaden your repertoire into radio plays, because I know on your LinkedIn, you write, you're the voice when Cumberbatch is busy and listening to you, there are undertones of Benedict Cumberbatch in your voice, and Benedict before he became really popular, he did something like Cabin Pressure, which is so fun.

CT: Yeah.

F: Would you be open to doing radio plays like that?

CT: Definitely. I've just recently come from a voiceover conference in the UK and did a couple of workshops and that reminded me of what the work is that I want to actively seek out. And there's a lot of audio drama stuff floating about, a lot of that is available via social media or is operated in the U.S. as opposed to in the UK., though there are some great ones in the UK. as well, and it's tricky to know why and how to validate some of those things. So, it's something that I would love to explore doing more of as well as, you know, you can do these audio drama things, which are kind of like shorter versions of audio books, almost essentially with not so many voices. And I think those medium and short form ways of storytelling would be lovely. It would be great because I'm not right for a lot of video games. 

I don't think I'll ever be actually a very prolific video game actor if that makes sense because I'm okay at shouting and I can play some monsters and I've got a couple of accents in the bag and that kind of thing in terms of doing voices. People will say it's about the acting Chris, it's not about voices, but doing some voices and being able to nail certain things there are people that are brilliant at that. But there are people who have probably a wider palette of voices than I will ever have. 

I never started out as a voice actor. I'm very much an actor who uses the voice, and I'm trying to broaden that out a little bit more as I keep on going. But I want to open myself up to more different types of stuff to be creatively fulfilled. The prospect of going into a recording session and screaming “grenade” and “bang” is not very fulfilling. I did that for a few games, and then I'm done with that. Like the money's not good enough for me to do that. I mean, never say never. If the money does become good enough, then we can talk. But you push your voice and it's a different kind of acting, I'll put it that way.

F: So, last question. What would be a dream come true project for you?

CT: A dream come true project? Probably something entirely original that I can't imagine. I would love to be able to work on an audio project where I'm working with other actors in real time. I would love to be able to work with most of the cast in Rogue Trader, for example, but I’d love it for us to be able to have dialogues where you're actually responding to each other as opposed to insert A, B or C here, that kind of thing. Because that's the one thing I kind of miss so much from the audio side of work is you getting something unexpected from the other person and then riffing off it. You have to self-generate as a voice actor that a director will go do you want to try it like this? Or maybe like this, it's supposed to be funny. Try it dead pan, that kind of thing.

But quite often that kind of spontaneous element of discovery only comes from when someone gives you a line in a way that you really didn't expect, and maybe it makes you laugh, when it's supposed to be tragic or whatever, those kinds of things. The biggest thing I miss about stage work is when you're working with an actor at the top of your game and they raise you up to their level. It's terrifying, but in the best way. Some actors can do that effortlessly because they're so in the moment, because they don't know what they're going to do next, even though they can find their light and make sure that the audience is still seeing their brilliant acting at the same time. Clever, clever bunnies. That feeling because they don't know exactly where they're going, you're kind alive to the moment in a way that quite often you're not, and if there was a way to be able to replicate that in an audio way and a long form storytelling way, then that would be cool. 

I've just started playing a little bit of D&D and I don't know if I'll ever get good at that, especially in terms of like, so I've got to come up with words. Oh my God. Whereas I will never watch a D&D playthrough for four hours on YouTube myself, personally, life choice, I can start to understand the appeal of that because there's an element of that spontaneity and playfulness, but in a group. So, if there was a way to do that with actually scripted drama, I'd be all in on that. That would be amazing. Or some kind of hybrid. So I don't know exactly what that is, but that kind of thing would be quite cool. 

F: That's what the BBC did with Cabin Pressure. I attended one live recording and it was just amazing. You have all the other actors [apart from Benedict Cumberbatch] that are household names. And to see them act and how little takes they actually need for the lines and everything is amazing.

CT: Yeah, there's an appreciation of the craft, but it's also the fact that it's not into a void. It's not like, okay, we've done three. Is that okay? We're onto the next. I think in many ways it can make the work much easier, because you're using your imagination, but in a different way, because you're operating with a stimulus. And that's always exciting.

F: And good D&D is just like improv theatre.

CT: Yeah, exactly.

F: Really good players are spontaneous. Just very creative.

CT: That should be celebrated and I think harnessing more of those kinds of things would be fun, because in all honesty, still probably about 60, 70 percent of the work that I do is in the corporate and business sphere. That's just because of how I sound. I didn't go out to court that work particularly, but in terms of the stuff that pays the bills regularly, that's the kind of stuff that I do. Even then, you're trying to find levels of playfulness or colour so that you're not just coming over with: “in a world where you can trust a big corporation to take your money.” So, there's any kind of nuance or subtlety to that, that will be a good thing. So that's the kind of stuff that I crave as a result.

F: Thank you for your time.

CT: Oh, my pleasure.

F: It went by so fast. We went over time; I still have a lot more questions.

CT: Oh, sorry.

F: No, no, no, no, no, no. That, that's, that's absolutely fine. Thank you.

[leebrontide]

Ok so I said I would do a post on “reasons you’re not writing” from the POV of a writer/therapist who works with anxious, depressed, and neurodivergent clients. If you dig that, read on.

But firstly, a disclaimer. This list is far from comprehensive. Don’t yell at me if your experience isn’t represented. This is a tumblr post. Have realistic expectations.

Also, sometimes the reason you’re not writing is that your other obligations are just taking all of your energy and focus. Fixing that is well beyond the scope of this.

That said, here’s a bunch of barriers I see people run into all the time.

1) You’re afraid of failing, and subconsciously feel like it’s safer not to try.

This is a tricky one, because it's probably messing up many areas of your life, which in turn means you're going to frequently feel stressed out in general, which speaks to the point above.

This is around about where the general internet will tend to offer you an array of affirmations to use to sooth yourself. And that's fine. If those work for you, then use them! BUT, if the affirmations aren't working, then friend you have a bigger project on your hands.

You need to get comfortable with failing, particularly at creative projects. I know that can feel scary and vulnerable, but you won't take risks if you can't fail, which is going to hem in your creativity so hard that your motivation will starve. This is why people talk about writing a garbage draft. Not because they want to make garbage, but because they need the option of making garbage in order to take risks. That may or may not work for you, but either way, you really might wanna look at how to lower your stakes.

2) You’re not sure what you’re trying to communicate.

You can make things happen in the story, but you feel like you’re wandering around aimlessly. You don't find you're making decisions with conviction. It might be hard to really fall in love with any of your writing decisions.

For this one, I suggest stepping back and figuring out what the core of your enthusiasm for a story consists of. That CAN be a message or philosophy. It can also be a feeling or a vibe or a dynamic. That gives you a structure that you can build your decisions around, that you can be enthusiastic about.

3) You switched hyperfocus. And maybe your new hyperfocus is a lot of fun, but you feel sadness thinking about the WIP you left behind.

This one has a similar need to the one before, with an added layer of nuance, because you're probably already struggling with identifying what does interest you. This can make people feel really hopeless and helpless.

I have three totally different suggestions for this one. The first is to just be patient with yourself. Sometimes it's good for your brain to just indulge, and let your brain mine for dopamine where it can. Like, lean in. Spa day for your brain, as long as it's feeling good.

Secondly, see if you can find creative ways to weave your hyperfocus into your writing. Is there a dynamic in your favorite show that can inspire your writing, even if it's an original work? Do you want to take a moment to think about how transportation works in the history of your world? Can you consider your MCs relationship to old movies?

It doesn't always work, but sometimes instead of trying to switch things over, you can build a bridge, that gives depth and texture to your work.

Finally- consider embracing short fiction! Do some writing inspired directly by the hyperfocus du joir while it's around.

4) You feel like nothing you say will be interesting to anyone else.

We understand this is a self-esteem issue, right? You're gonna have to develop the trust that your experiences are not so utterly unrelatable to everyone else that your perspective has no value.

Friend, you are a human, with human experiences, writing for other humans. Trust me, you can do this.

It can help to think about your actual convictions. What do you know? What have you experienced? What matters to you? Funnily enough, the cure for feeling like nothing in you is worth expressing is to pour more of yourself into your writing.

5) You’re collapsed. It’s hard to feel enthusiasm and energy for things.

You're not gonna like this, but for this one I encourage you to put your keyboard or notebook down and stop trying to write right now. I know that when you're feeling better the writing feels good, and you're trying to feel better because everyone is telling you to feel better.

But it's not working, is it? If it was, you wouldn't be reading this.

For many people, writing requires them to be able to feel investment and excitement, because those feelings help steer them towards what's going to work and be exciting for the reader.

Your best bet is to focus your energy on finding gentle little activities that aren't so hard to focus on. Ideally, ones that get you moving just a little bit. You'll have a better time writing when you're less collapsed.

Shaming yourself and getting hopeless and anxious because you can't do this really difficult task right now will make you more collapsed, not less, which will be the opposite of helpful.

And yes, these are depression symptoms. Consider reaching out for supports and assessment around that if you can.

6) You can’t figure out the next step.

Thank God for the internet, this one is a lot more actionable than it used to be.

The first thing to do here is step back and ask yourself "where am I getting lost?" If you have someone to talk this through with, even better.

Then you hop on to your favorite search engine and type in "Stuck on my outline 2nd act" or "can't get started editing" or whatever. People LOVE giving writing advice. There's plenty around. Read some advice! Try things out!

Now here is the critical point- when and if that advice fails, stop and figure out why it failed. For example, I have a short term memory disorder. Most writing process advice is for people who do not have short term memory impairments. So a lot of the advice just plain didn't work for me.

By figuring out that my subpar memory was in the way of my writing process, I was able to put together processes that work for my specific brain and my specific process. You can read about that in more depth here and here.

Frankenstien yourself a process out of stolen bits of other people's processes, with an understanding of your own personalized needs as the lightning that brings it all to life. If you have even traits of ADHD or autism or other forms of neurodiversity (no diagnosis needed) you might also google "ADHD editing hacks".

Finally, and maybe most importantly, chuck anything that you can't adapt right into the trash. I don't care how great the writer who gave the advice is. That's what works for their life and their brain. You have neither. Writing advice is only as useful as it is adaptable.

7) You think of yourself as someone who doesn’t finish things, possibly with history to back that up.

Oh, I feel this one. This was me so hard. For so long.

Make room for the idea that you can and will change over time. Getting shit done is largely a matter of developing a bunch of skills. You've already developed so many different skills in your life that you might not even recognize some of them as skills. But I promise you that you have.

But you see #6? Go read that one again. If you're not finishing things, it's because there's something missing in your routine and process that you haven't developed skills around yet.

I'm not gonna tell you it's easy, but you can find and isolate the barriers and figure out ways around them.

8) You have too many projects and feel frozen when you try to pick one to work on.

Ask yourself if this is a real problem. It may be! Maybe you dream of making a living off of your writing! That requires a level of consistency.

But it also might just be that you've had it drilling into your head that not finishing things is some kind of personal failing.

Write out all your WIPs and story seeds.

See if some of them can be mushed into one. Some AMAZING stories come from people combining story ideas that seem separate into a single story. That's fun.

See if some of them are not for finishing. What's that post going around? Some stories are for finishing, and some are just for "getting the wiggles out"? That's solid advice.

Maybe some stories are just for daydreaming on the bus. Maybe some stories are actually only 1/3rd of a story, and you want to leave it to grow in the ground before you try to do anything with it. That's incredibly valid and common!

If you actually look at the stories that you have that are for finishing, right now, you may find a much more manageable number. And if you only have like 2 or 3 things you're working on, you can just let them take turns as the passion for each project takes you.

Keep a file somewhere of these undeveloped ideas. I have a scrivner file that has each idea it's own little sub-document so I can add thoughts to them for years as they percolate.

9) You get lost in preparation and don’t make it to the page.

A couple different things can be happening here. One thing that may be happening is that you're just a writer who needs a lot of research and prep time before you write. I'm like that. I will prewrite intensively for a year before I write a single sentence. That sounds ridiculous to a lot of people but it works with how my brain works and then when I do start writing I can easily and happily churn out a consistent 2-4k words per hour. If it works it works! Don't let anyone shame you!

The other option is that you feel like you're going to get something wrong/fail/get in trouble if you get anything "wrong". You feel safer doing research, so that's where you stay.

Only you can figure out which it is. Introspect. Then you know whether to focus on managing anxiety or just keep preppin.

10) You want to write, but when you sit down to write suddenly it’s two hours later and you’ve written like 5 words but curated 3 new playlists, read some fanfiction, and argued with some strangers on the internet.

Brains are rough, aren't they.

There are two schools of thought here. Both work, but not for all the same people.

Option 1 is to clear distractions. Download one of those apps that keeps you off the internet. Put your phone someplace that you need a ladder to reach, so you have to very actively decide to go get it. Noise cancelling headphones. Comfy clothes. Protein rich snacks and a beverage within easy reach. Pee ahead of time. Make a routine out of it to train your brain into associating this with focus.

Option 2 is to figure out the optimal level of distraction. When I write nonfiction I almost always have mindless home renovation shows on at the same time. Because nonficiton writing isn't quite stimulating enough to hold my attention. So my attention wanders and I end up doing something that WILL hold my attention. When I write fiction, I need music OR to be outdoors where I can look at trees or clouds or people on the sidewalk. I can't watch any kind of TV.

Think of your attention like a pie chart. Different writing tasks may take up different percentages of that pie. If you're awesome at focus maybe you can just put 90% of your focus on writing, and the other 10% is just making sure you don't forget to eat or something. But if you can't reliably conjure up more than 70% for one thing, then fill the rest of the pie with things you can easily pick up and put down. I only look up at the home decorating shows when my passive audio scanning suggests it's something I want to look up at.

These are both good approaches. Ignore anyone who demonizes either. That only means they've found the version that works for them.

You have your brain. Build a process for your brain.

I hope this helps. I have a free monthly newsletter if you like hearing my rants. It is...not consistently about writing advice or mental health. One time I wrote about how genetically modified goats are related to French colonized Madagascar in the 1800s as well as the modern US military. One time I broke down modern challenges to medical privacy practice policies. This is all to do with what I write but in an idiosyncratic way.

Cause I gotta write about what I care about.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The (open) web is good, actually

I'll be at the Studio City branch of the LA Public Library tonight (Monday, November 13) at 1830hPT to launch my new novel, The Lost Cause. There'll be a reading, a talk, a surprise guest (!!) and a signing, with books on sale. Tell your friends! Come on down!

The great irony of the platformization of the internet is that platforms are intermediaries, and the original promise of the internet that got so many of us excited about it was disintermediation – getting rid of the middlemen that act as gatekeepers between community members, creators and audiences, buyers and sellers, etc.

The platformized internet is ripe for rent seeking: where the platform captures an ever-larger share of the value generated by its users, making the service worst for both, while lock-in stops people from looking elsewhere. Every sector of the modern economy is less competitive, thanks to monopolistic tactics like mergers and acquisitions and predatory pricing. But with tech, the options for making things worse are infinitely divisible, thanks to the flexibility of digital systems, which means that product managers can keep subdividing the Jenga blocks they pulling out of the services we rely on. Combine platforms with monopolies with digital flexibility and you get enshittification:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

An enshittified, platformized internet is bad for lots of reasons – it concentrates decisions about who may speak and what may be said into just a few hands; it creates a rich-get-richer dynamic that creates a new oligarchy, with all the corruption and instability that comes with elite capture; it makes life materially worse for workers, users, and communities.

But there are many other ways in which the enshitternet is worse than the old good internet. Today, I want to talk about how the enshitternet affects openness and all that entails. An open internet is one whose workings are transparent (think of "open source"), but it's also an internet founded on access – the ability to know what has gone before, to recall what has been said, and to revisit the context in which it was said.

At last week's Museum Computer Network conference, Aaron Straup Cope gave a talk on museums and technology called "Wishful Thinking – A critical discussion of 'extended reality' technologies in the cultural heritage sector" that beautifully addressed these questions of recall and revisiting:

https://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2023/11/11/therapy/#wishful

Cope is a museums technologist who's worked on lots of critical digital projects over the years, and in this talk, he addresses himself to the difference between the excitement of the galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM) sector over the possibilities of the web, and why he doesn't feel the same excitement over the metaverse, and its various guises – XR, VR, MR and AR.

The biggest reason to be excited about the web was – and is – the openness of disintermediation. The internet was inspired by the end-to-end principle, the idea that the network's first duty was to transmit data from willing senders to willing receivers, as efficiently and reliably as possible. That principle made it possible for whole swathes of people to connect with one another. As Cope writes, openness "was not, and has never been, a guarantee of a receptive audience or even any audience at all." But because it was "easy and cheap enough to put something on the web," you could "leave it there long enough for others to find it."

That dynamic nurtured an environment where people could have "time to warm up to ideas." This is in sharp contrast to the social media world, where "[anything] not immediately successful or viral … was a waste of time and effort… not worth doing." The social media bias towards a river of content that can't be easily reversed is one in which the only ideas that get to spread are those the algorithm boosts.

This is an important way to understand the role of algorithms in the context of the spread of ideas – that without recall or revisiting, we just don't see stuff, including stuff that might challenge our thinking and change our minds. This is a much more materialistic and grounded way to talk about algorithms and ideas than the idea that Big Data and AI make algorithms so persuasive that they can control our minds:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

As bad as this is in the social media context, it's even worse in the context of apps, which can't be linked into, bookmarked, or archived. All of this made apps an ominous sign right from the beginning:

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/01/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/

Apps interact with law in precisely the way that web-pages don't. "An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a crime to defend yourself against corporate predation":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/27/an-audacious-plan-to-halt-the-internets-enshittification-and-throw-it-into-reverse/

Apps are "closed" in every sense. You can't see what's on an app without installing the app and "agreeing" to its terms of service. You can't reverse-engineer an app (to add a privacy blocker, or to change how it presents information) without risking criminal and civil liability. You can't bookmark anything the app won't let you bookmark, and you can't preserve anything the app won't let you preserve.

Despite being built on the same underlying open frameworks – HTTP, HTML, etc – as the web, apps have the opposite technological viewpoint to the web. Apps' technopolitics are at war with the web's technopolitics. The web is built around recall – the ability to see things, go back to things, save things. The web has the technopolitics of a museum:

https://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2014/09/11/brand/#dconstruct

By comparison, apps have the politics of a product, and most often, that product is a rent-seeking, lock-in-hunting product that wants to take you hostage by holding something you love hostage – your data, perhaps, or your friends:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

When Anil Dash described "The Web We Lost" in 2012, he was describing a web with the technopolitics of a museum:

where tagging was combined with permissive licenses to make it easy for people to find and reuse each others' stuff;

where it was easy to find out who linked to you in realtime even though most of us were posting to our own sites, which they controlled;

where a link from one site to another meant one person found another person's contribution worthy;

where privacy-invasive bids to capture the web were greeted with outright hostility;

where every service that helped you post things that mattered to you was expected to make it easy for you take that data back if you changed services;

where inlining or referencing material from someone else's site meant following a technical standard, not inking a business-development deal;

https://www.anildash.com/2012/12/13/the_web_we_lost/

Ten years later, Dash's "broken tech/content culture cycle" described the web we live on now:

https://www.anildash.com/2022/02/09/the-stupid-tech-content-culture-cycle/

found your platform by promising to facilitate your users' growth;

order your technologists and designers to prioritize growth above all other factors and fire anyone who doesn't deliver;

grow without regard to the norms of your platform's users;

plaster over the growth-driven influx of abusive and vile material by assigning it to your "most marginalized, least resourced team";

deliver a half-assed moderation scheme that drives good users off the service and leaves no one behind but griefers, edgelords and trolls;

steadfastly refuse to contemplate why the marginalized users who made your platform attractive before being chased away have all left;

flail about in a panic over illegal content, do deals with large media brands, seize control over your most popular users' output;

"surface great content" by algorithmically promoting things that look like whatever's successful, guaranteeing that nothing new will take hold;

overpay your top performers for exclusivity deals, utterly neglect any pipeline for nurturing new performers;

abuse your creators the same ways that big media companies have for decades, but insist that it's different because you're a tech company;

ignore workers who warn that your product is a danger to society, dismiss them as "millennials" (defined as "anyone born after 1970 or who has a student loan")

when your platform is (inevitably) implicated in a murder, have a "town hall" overseen by a crisis communications firm;

pay the creator who inspired the murder to go exclusive on your platform;

dismiss the murder and fascist rhetoric as "growing pains";

when truly ghastly stuff happens on your platform, give your Trust and Safety team a 5% budget increase;

chase growth based on "emotionally engaging content" without specifying whether the emotions should be positive;

respond to ex-employees' call-outs with transient feelings of guilt followed by dismissals of "cancel culture":

fund your platforms' most toxic users and call it "free speech";

whenever anyone disagrees with any of your decisions, dismiss them as being "anti-free speech";

start increasing how much your platform takes out of your creators' paychecks;

force out internal dissenters, dismiss external critics as being in conspiracy with your corporate rivals;

once regulation becomes inevitable, form a cartel with the other large firms in your sector and insist that the problem is a "bad algorithm";

"claim full victim status," and quit your job, complaining about the toll that running a big platform took on your mental wellbeing.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/18/broken-records/#dashes

The web wasn't inevitable – indeed, it was wildly improbable. Tim Berners Lee's decision to make a new platform that was patent-free, open and transparent was a complete opposite approach to the strategy of the media companies of the day. They were building walled gardens and silos – the dialup equivalent to apps – organized as "branded communities." The way I experienced it, the web succeeded because it was so antithetical to the dominant vision for the future of the internet that the big companies couldn't even be bothered to try to kill it until it was too late.

Companies have been trying to correct that mistake ever since. After three or four attempts to replace the web with various garbage systems all called "MSN," Microsoft moved on to trying to lock the internet inside a proprietary browser. Years later, Facebook had far more success in an attempt to kill HTML with React. And of course, apps have gobbled up so much of the old, good internet.

Which brings us to Cope's views on museums and the metaverse. There's nothing intrinsically proprietary about virtual worlds and all their permutations. VRML is a quarter of a century old – just five years younger than Snow Crash:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML

But the current enthusiasm for virtual worlds isn't merely a function of the interesting, cool and fun experiences you can have in them. Rather, it's a bid to kill off whatever is left of the old, good web and put everything inside a walled garden. Facebook's metaverse "is more of the same but with a technical footprint so expensive and so demanding that it all but ensures it will only be within the means of a very few companies to operate."

Facebook's VR headsets have forward-facing cameras, turning every users into a walking surveillance camera. Facebook put those cameras there for "pass through" – so they can paint the screens inside the headset with the scene around you – but "who here believes that Facebook doesn't have other motives for enabling an always-on camera capturing the world around you?"

Apple's VisionPro VR headset is "a near-perfect surveillance device," and "the only thing to save this device is the trust that Apple has marketed its brand on over the last few years." Cope notes that "a brand promise is about as fleeting a guarantee as you can get." I'll go further: Apple is already a surveillance company:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

The technopolitics of the metaverse are the opposite of the technopolitics of the museum – even moreso than apps. Museums that shift their scarce technology budgets to virtual worlds stand a good chance of making something no one wants to use, and that's the best case scenario. The worst case is that museums make a successful project inside a walled garden, one where recall is subject to corporate whim, and help lure their patrons away from the recall-friendly internet to the captured, intermediated metaverse.

It's true that the early web benefited from a lot of hype, just as the metaverse is enjoying today. But the similarity ends there: the metaverse is designed for enclosure, the web for openness. Recall is a historical force for "the right to assembly… access to basic literacy… a public library." The web was "an unexpected gift with the ability to change the order of things; a gift that merits being protected, preserved and promoted both internally and externally." Museums were right to jump on the web bandwagon, because of its technopolitics. The metaverse, with its very different technopolitics, is hostile to the very idea of museums.

In joining forces with metaverse companies, museums strike a Faustian bargain, "because we believe that these places are where our audiences have gone."

The GLAM sector is devoted to access, to recall, and to revisiting. Unlike the self-style free speech warriors whom Dash calls out for self-serving neglect of their communities, the GLAM sector is about preservation and access, the true heart of free expression. When a handful of giant companies organize all our discourse, the ability to be heard is contingent on pleasing the ever-shifting tastes of the algorithm. This is the problem with the idea that "freedom of speech isn't freedom of reach" – if a platform won't let people who want to hear from you see what you have to say, they are indeed compromising freedom of speech:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

Likewise, "censorship" is not limited to "things that governments do." As Ada Palmer so wonderfully describes it in her brilliant "Why We Censor: from the Inquisition to the Internet" speech, censorship is like arsenic, with trace elements of it all around us:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMMJb3AxA0s

A community's decision to ban certain offensive conduct or words on pain of expulsion or sanction is censorship – but not to the same degree that, say, a government ban on expressing certain points of view is. However, there are many kinds of private censorship that rise to the same level as state censorship in their impact on public discourse (think of Moms For Liberty and their book-bannings).

It's not a coincidence that Palmer – a historian – would have views on censorship and free speech that intersect with Cope, a museum worker. One of the most brilliant moments in Palmer's speech is where she describes how censorship under the Inquistion was not state censorship – the Inquisition was a multinational, nongovernmental body that was often in conflict with state power.

Not all intermediaries are bad for speech or access. The "disintermediation" that excited early web boosters was about escaping from otherwise inescapable middlemen – the people who figured out how to control and charge for the things we did with one another.

When I was a kid, I loved the writing of Crad Kilodney, a short story writer who sold his own self-published books on Toronto street-corners while wearing a sign that said "VERY FAMOUS CANADIAN AUTHOR, BUY MY BOOKS" (he also had a sign that read, simply, "MARGARET ATWOOD"). Kilodney was a force of nature, who wrote, edited, typeset, printed, bound, and sold his own books:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books/article-late-street-poet-and-publishing-scourge-crad-kilodney-left-behind-a/

But there are plenty of writers out there that I want to hear from who lack the skill or the will to do all of that. Editors, publishers, distributors, booksellers – all the intermediaries who sit between a writer and their readers – are not bad. They're good, actually. The problem isn't intermediation – it's capture.

For generations, hucksters have conned would-be writers by telling them that publishing won't buy their books because "the gatekeepers" lack the discernment to publish "quality" work. Friends of mine in publishing laughed at the idea that they would deliberately sideline a book they could figure out how to sell – that's just not how it worked.

But today, monopolized film studios are literally annihilating beloved, high-priced, commercially viable works because they are worth slightly more as tax writeoffs than they are as movies:

https://deadline.com/2023/11/coyote-vs-acme-shelved-warner-bros-discovery-writeoff-david-zaslav-1235598676/

There's four giant studios and five giant publishers. Maybe "five" is the magic number and publishing isn't concentrated enough to drop whole novels down the memory hole for a tax deduction, but even so, publishing is trying like hell to shrink to four:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/07/random-penguins/#if-you-wanted-to-get-there-i-wouldnt-start-from-here

Even as the entertainment sector is working to both literally and figuratively destroy our libraries, the cultural heritage sector is grappling with preserving these libraries, with shrinking budgets and increased legal threats:

https://blog.archive.org/2023/03/25/the-fight-continues/

I keep meeting artists of all description who have been conditioned to be suspicious of anything with the word "open" in its name. One colleague has repeatedly told me that fighting for the "open internet" is a self-defeating rhetorical move that will scare off artists who hear "open" and think "Big Tech ripoff."

But "openness" is a necessary precondition for preservation and access, which are the necessary preconditions for recall and revisiting. Here on the last, melting fragment of the open internet, as tech- and entertainment-barons are seizing control over our attention and charging rent on our ability to talk and think together, openness is our best hope of a new, good internet. T

he cultural heritage sector wants to save our creative works. The entertainment and tech industry want to delete them and take a tax writeoff.

As a working artist, I know which side I'm on.

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/2023/11/13/this-is-for-everyone/#revisiting

Image: Diego Delso (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Museo_Mimara,_Zagreb,_Croacia,_2014-04-20,_DD_01.JPG

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

[amerricanartwork]

Quetzalli on Trafficlights and Birds

Well @toxictoxicities, it has been done! You gave me the chance for me to give my own interpretation on this matter, and I can’t resist chances to add some narrative significance! I decided to make a separate post on it because what I came up with ended up being long (as always with me), and in case anyone else would enjoy these thoughts.

However before I go in with this essay I've put together I have to give a very important note: These thoughts are gonna be primarily based around my personal interpretations and headcanons for Seven Red Suns and No Significant Harassment. I’m generally a person who needs to know exactly what I’m working with to do something well, and as such my ideas about metaphors, symbolism, and greater narrative significance typically depend a lot on me understanding the characters and ship not just in their general dynamic, but various other deeper elements — what their core desires/fears are, what their backstories/histories are, each of their main character traits and why they are that way, then from there what they see in each other and why their relationship benefits each other in-universe, and what other effect(s) the relationship has or could have on the characters in-universe as well as the greater narrative out-of-universe, with the additional optional knowledge of what the main plot of the story they come from is to possibly tie in important moments. Seeing as you probably aren’t going to explain your Trafficlights interpretation completely to this intense of a degree anytime soon (though I’d absolutely enjoy hearing it whenever it comes!), if I’m going to make some metaphors I think the best option is to just use my current character interpretations so I have this background familiarity, especially since I’ve actually been developing these things a whole lot for my own iterator off-the-string happy ending AU!

Also, I want to say to that if some of these idea sound familiar, it’s because I realized I can actually project some of my previous Lilypad ideas onto this Trafficlights portrayal as well. I feel my Suns and Moon are similar enough in their personality traits that many of the same dynamics and significance could reasonably apply. In fact Tox, I’m gonna admit I actually did take some inspiration for my Lilypad portrayal from seeing your particular Trafficlights and drawing my own conclusions about how that dynamic worked, and overall my depiction of Seven Red Suns is largely inspired by your own take on that character, which I found quite unique compared to the rest of the fandom for being the first one I saw to show Suns as being far less imposing and confident internally than they seem in public. So I guess I am once again coming full circle now!

I think this is already more than enough words, but I just felt the need to give those prefaces as context for all of these ideas. With that being said, I hope you like at least some of these!

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

Option 1: Birds as Freedom

From what I’ve read, a common symbolism for birds is freedom, which to me is easy to see because of their signature flight ability. Flight can be considered the mode of travel with the greatest freedom because it’s not restricted by landmasses (or even planets, if you include space travel), and because flying is literally defying, or “freeing oneself” from gravity, one can easily associate it with weightlessness and thus being carefree and without worries or negativity.

With any off-the-string iterator story, it’s easy to give going off-the-string a positive significance because it’s literally the puppet “freeing itself” from the limited confines of their chamber, and by extent the limits imposed upon them by the Ancients. This is further supported by how some iterators in canon do appear to perceive their cans as a limitation or cage, as evidenced by the broadcast dialogue. In fact, I've heard No Significant Harassment is one of these very iterators, so I imagine he’d absolutely want to go off-the-string so long as he has a good incentive to. 

To relate this back to birds, you could very much use a caged songbird as a metaphor for the iterators; beautiful, brightly-colored creatures “raised” in captivity and trapped in boxes to serve other people, once “singing” out their ideas from within to those people, but now just giving those “songs” to each other. Thus, going off-the-string (perhaps to the Emergence facility in your AU) could be seen as these “birds” finally flying free to be with one another “in the wild”, finally able to fly and live their lives more fully as they were denied for so long. So regardless of any other symbolism, Trafficlights — and any other off-the-string iterator ship by extent — leaving their cans could be seen as them “flying free” together from the restraints forced upon them.

However, I’ve also recently realized another freedom symbolism besides freedom from the Ancients’ restrictions, and that’s freedom from their own. This is something more impactful to my Seven Red Suns, who like Moon, is also someone who hides a lot of his true personality for a more polite, proper, and dignified public persona, shoulders a lot of weight he isn’t always able to handle alone, and puts lots of limits on himself and what he’s “allowed” or “supposed” to do, albeit for entirely different reasons. Now contrast that with Sig, who although he also hides a lot of his true feelings and knows when to dial it down, is someone who is a master at breaking rules and going against convention. In fact, I like to imagine it’s literally in his nature (er, programming) to think outside the box, generating all sorts of different ideas to solve problems that don’t always totally follow outside rules or what’s “typical” for using a certain item. 

When you bring these two together, I imagine Sig could absolutely be the one to encourage Suns to let loose more, letting down his proper and and uptight persona to show more of his emotional side and explore things he didn’t allow himself to before (like I said, this is one of the ideas that works with Trafficlights as well as Lilypad)! It’s as if Suns is a bird too used to living in the cage and afraid to truly fly again, and Sig has to coax him out into embracing that freedom. You could even take this with the idea of iterators not being used to romance, a restriction Suns absolutely puts on himself and even others because he believes a “proper” iterator isn’t supposed to have such deep attachments, of which romantic love could be considered the worst because it’s both breaking Karma 3 of Companionship and can directly lead to Karma 2 of Sexual Intercourse, so it’s essentially a double-risk. But again, Sig is willing to explore these new feelings, and now that they’re off the string and can love each other more physically and directly than ever, what better time could there be for Suns to “spread his wings” and fly alongside him?

Option 2: Birds as Passion/Romance

To me, the second biggest symbolism that birds can have is that of passion and general romantic ideas. Technically all birds could have this association because feathers and wings in general are pretty showy, so spreading one’s wings could just as easily be a gesture of great emotion and expression as it could be preparing to be free. In addition though, whereas the previous point was more related to songbirds, this seems to correlate more with birds of paradise especially, who have the most colorful and varied plumage of the bird kingdom, thus making it easy to say they’re “showing their true colors” without fear. Some birds of paradise, particularly parrots/parakeets/macaws/etc. are very social creatures by nature, so it’s even easier to draw the connection between their vibrant plumage and social behavior with being expressive and outgoing.

As for the romance element, to me it seems birds are commonly used as such symbols already; there’s doves and swans being symbols of love often included in some way at weddings, words like “lovebirds” referring to lovers as well as one of my favorite words, “twitterpated”, which means to be very smitten and infatuated and also has a clear bird-based association and maybe even origin. But then there’s the idea of songbirds singing to each other, which I think is a particularly romantic idea which plays into one of my favorite shipping tropes I call, “answering the call”. So far, I like to describe it as when someone is looking for companionship and romance for a while, either openly or as a subconscious desire, but is eventually found and “answered” by someone willing to love with them. It’s such a romantic idea to me because it often includes so much loneliness and sometimes even tragedy before, making that moment where they finally find someone all the more sweet!

Okay, now to bring this back to Trafficlights. Starting with the first idea, I think it’s easy to associate Sig with these kinds of birds, especially macaws and such, seeing as I imagine he can be just as “colorful” both literally and personality-wise, and cares deeply about his relationships in a similar manner. But even then, like I mentioned before Sig can sometimes feel like he needs to hide those feelings because others don’t fully understand him and he doesn’t want to risk creating tension (although hiding his feelings like that kinda does anyway). 

To resolve this, I’ve decided to use what I imagine Sig would appreciate and value in Suns that would evolve the relationship past friendship to romance, that being that Suns was one of the first people besides Moon who believed that Sig’s ideas and his dedication to his friends could be something more, something better and used for good. My Suns is defined largely by his perfectionism and endless drive to make things the “best” versions of themselves. In my timeline of events he already helped Sig in that way during a pretty important moment, not to mention it’s just really inspiring how much Suns cares about trying to bring about the “best” for everyone. On Sig’s end, this is how they at least developed a friendship, and in this alternative what would cause that appreciation to evolve to romance eventually. In fact, in my headcanon it was the combined efforts of Moon first understanding Sig’s feelings and Suns helping to perfect his role in his group, with both of them working really hard to help him find new belonging with the Local Group, that was what got Sig out of his “rough patch”. Thus, in a way, Suns directly helped Sig make new connections, “spread his wings”, and “find a new flock”, which can easily be the main reason why Sig would fall for Suns.

Now, what about Suns? Relating him to birds and passion also hinges largely on another pretty crucial headcanon about my Seven Red Suns, which is that he is secretly a huge romantic with a passion for the fine arts. In addition to striving for an “ideal” world at all times, he appreciates art and the deeper symbolism within. However, because of what I said earlier about Suns placing a lot of high standards on himself, he doesn’t actually make art of his own, believing it’s “not an iterator’s place” to do such a thing themselves because it’s not in their purpose. But even then, he can’t help himself from seeing things artistically and drawing his own conclusions about things.

That being said, I imagine Suns could have a strong appreciation for birds in particular; their beauty, combined with their flight, makes them seem as though they’ve already “ascended” on some level above other animals. On top of that, I think Suns would come to see Sig as sort of a bird himself! Maybe a big green macaw with the most beautiful plumes who’s also far more intelligent than others think. But even more so, when it comes to what Suns appreciates in Sig that causes him to fall in love, I imagine it’s how Sig is the only person who sees through his facade for who he really is. Everyone else around him seems to either put him on a pedestal, with their own high expectations to follow, or is intimidated by his grandeur into avoiding much direct contact. Again, however, Sig naturally thinks outside the box and challenging people’s ideas, so it’d be pretty easy for him to break down some of Suns’s diplomacy to show that more emotional side (another idea that I use in Lilypad as well). No Significant Harassment is the one person Suns feels like he can be himself around, helping him realize that even those parts of him he hides make him “perfect” by virtue of being his real and unique self. It’s like Suns is a great eagle, looked up to and feared by other birds as a large bird of prey and thus lonely and pressured to soar above all else, and only the surprisingly smart macaw is able to lower his guard, helping him see he’s just as beautiful and inspiring on the ground as he is soaring high in the clouds. 

And then there’s the idea of “answering the call”. I’ve already seen your Trafficlights will probably play out as a slow burn, with Sig and Suns harboring growing feelings for each other for a while but only really acting on it once Emergence kicks in. In this case the dynamic would be mutual, with both of them longing for a deeper connection, but perhaps not realizing it until this timeline. I imagine Sig would be the one more conscious of this desire though, seeing as he openly seeks connection with others, so it’d be as if he’s a lonely songbird wanting to sing out but never getting an answer. And then of course, when Suns finally does respond it’s that much more poetic!

Trafficlights as Rio (spoilers, by the way)

OKAY HEAR ME OUT, I just have to include some words on this because this movie, this freaking movie is not only one of the two that kickstarted my love of birds but is what started this whole Trafficlights-as-birds-symbolism thing for me.

To give some context, if you don’t already know I am someone who not only loves making metaphors and symbolism with my ships, but loves finding associations between them and outside music or stories. I often look for connections to the old Disney animated fairytales, but I really end up doing it to all sorts of animated stories that I believe have pretty universal themes.

That being said, if there’s any association I’d make for Trafficlights as I currently see them, it’s to Blue Sky’s Rio and some of the scenes from that story. Firstly, Blu as a character already somewhat parallels my Suns in that he’s awkward and not the best at interacting with others. Not to mention his inability to fly, which came from him never getting a chance to embrace his emotions before being captured and taken from his home, could be paralleled to Suns’s bottling up his emotions, especially since flight in that film is directly related to feelings of happiness, love, and freedom, so Suns in a way is also “stunted” in his emotions. Meanwhile Sig on the other hand is more like Jewel, someone who at least understands his emotions a lot better and thus “knows how to fly”, and who resists others’ attempts to cage him and tries to get his partner to do the same. Like Blu Suns refuses at first, his logic and desire for a dignified self image getting the best of him being able to let loose in any environment where he isn’t surrounded by close friends. 

Then there’s the freaking “Hot Wings” scene, which takes the most responsibility for this association of mine. Largely because the two side-characters, Nico and Pedro, also seem to carry a dynamic with their lyrics that just reminds me of Suns and Sig, respectively, a lot (honestly I just thought about it on a whim one day and I can’t unsee it now…). Not to mention the entire scene is about pretty birds dancing, which given you’ve also made a decent number of drawings of Trafficlights dancing together, I think is just super fitting. And then Jewel’s singing once again brings back this idea of freedom and showing one’s emotions and love, with the remaining question being whether or not Blu can eventually unlock this feeling inside him despite his fears and fly up with her. This is something I think could work with Trafficlights, at least how I see them, for even if Suns can be more emotional around Sig and maybe his friends, he still has trouble doing so in public, not always liking the pressure of being “perfect” but not wanting to risk looking like a fool around everyone who looks up to him.

It works even better with one of the later scenes in the film when Blu and Jewel finally manage to cut the chain keeping them together, which causes Jewel to immediately lift into the sky with the pure joy and euphoria of once again being free to fly as she pleases. However, Blu is left looking up at her as she flies with their friends, and you can tell he’s both realizing again just how beautiful she is and longing so much to join her in the sky, yet still unable to fly. Once again I can’t help seeing Suns in Blu’s place, looking at Sig having fun and being so carefree, loving the feeling of being off-the-string, and him thinking Sig so beautiful and wanting to join him too. And eventually, just like Blu does in a true “answering the call fashion”, he is able to “spread his wings” and they finally can fly away together!

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

Okay, I think that’s all I have to say for now on this topic. This essay, excluding the preface at the beginning, is 2498 words! I think that might be a little bit more than my Lilypad essay! I really hope it delivered!

But even then, this was so fun to do! Even though Trafficlights isn’t my main ship and isn’t going to happen in my own AU, I’ve recently been looking to better figure out Sig and Suns’s relationship anyway to understand why they’re at least friends with each other. Of course there are some other factors in their relationship, some of which I’ve edited out for the sake of these ideas because it throws a bit of tension in the dynamic that could compromise its ability to work as a ship, but this was still an important aspect and I’m glad to have gotten a chance to develop it! And then of course, a reason to think about ships as well as shamelessly plug one of my favorite movies ever is also very nice!

This may all sound super silly and maybe none of it works with your Emergence Trafficlights, but regardless this was seriously such a fun opportunity, and I’m glad you gave me a reason to do this! I would love to hear your thoughts on or additions to all this, if you can!

[spacelazarwolf]

I really hate how often neo ra/df/ems will go on and on about how trans fem's transitions are waaaaaay more difficult and they're waaaaaay less likely to pass, but if a trans masc dared to make any similar comparisons, they'd be fucking crucified.

There are a lot of feelings I have around sex-based discrimination and the difficulties of a masculinizing transition. On one hand, I don't think comparing struggles like that is useful (i.e. trans women have harder transitions).

On the other hand, I feel like the reality of the situation is actually quite the opposite for many people (everyone acknowledges that testosterone makes your voice drop and you grow hair, but nobody seems to want to acknowledge hysterectomy vs orchi, voice training is still often needed, electrolysis for phallo, the fact that bottom surgery is usually multi-staged [even metoidioplasty is sometimes 2 stages] with a lot of moving parts and far worse scarring, top surgery is almost a necessity for passing whereas not every trans fem wants top surgery + scars are easier to hide, face masculinization is far less common w/ fewer options, puberty begins earlier in perisex people AFAB and puberty blockers don't always allow for full height to be achieved bc they don't typically allow you to start testosterone until you're about 15 even IF you were a "classic" trans-since-3-years-old kinda case, the extreme body horror that is accidental pregnancy and abortion and menstruation when that's dysphoric vs not being able to carry a pregnancy just feels like an insulting comparison sometimes and I've had multiple trans women call me inconsiderate for expressing horror at getting my bodily rights taken away bc "that triggers my dysphoria", testosterone is a scheduled substance and has more difficult administration methods than simply a pill, etc.)

And so I bite my tongue and try to be the better person, because stooping to that low doesn't help anything. But at the same time it's so extremely frustrating to be told that you "have it better" when, considering the facts, it REALLY feels like the opposite. There's this level of bitterness around that that I am DESPERATELY trying to resolve within myself. I have a therapist. I know it's projection. I'm working on my own bullshit. But please tell me I'm not alone in feeling this way? I just wish they'd stop with that rhetoric and realize just how difficult the average trans masc transition truly is

yeah it's really frustrating for ppl to present Trans Women's Experiences and Trans Men's Experiences as diametrically opposed, with one experience being Eternal Pain And Inescapable Suffering and the other being Barely A Blip On The Life Radar. and while i understand it's coming from a place of pain, i've also experienced a lot of trans women shutting me down when i try to talk about how abortion rights affect me. back when i was first dipping my toe into trans spaces, i was friends with a trans woman who told me it was transmisogynistic of me to want to transition because "trans women would kill to have been born in your body." and while it absolutely comes from a different place than when cis men try to assert control over me and there's not the same power dynamic, it's still a complete stranger feeling entitled to tell me what to do with my body because of the sex i was assigned at birth. it's frustrating to have people i'm supposed to be in community with play into the same sexist bullshit that other people, regardless of gender, have been holding over my head my whole life, feeling like they own my body bc women and ppl who are forcibly assigned the role of women in society are seen as public property. our bodies aren't our own. everyone feels entitled to comment on them and touch them and make decisions about them. and it sucks when it comes from other people who should understand how that feels.

and like. obviously this idea that trans men's transition is so much easier than trans women's is unhelpful bc 1. there is no one particular way for trans men to transition, 2. not everyone who transitions in the way typically associated with trans men is a trans man, 3. it doesn't take into account how disability, race, ethnicity, etc. play into people's experiences before, during, and after transition, and 4. it's just not a fucking competition????? the fact that a disabled black trans man is going to be more systemically oppressed in society than a wealthy white trans woman doesn't mean trans men as a category are Objectively More Oppressed than trans women. bc gender is like. the worst possible way to try to gauge a group's place within the system. bc at this point, gender is not the most powerful system, race is. and i feel like a fuck ton of people really do not recognize that.

another thing that has bugged me for as long as i've been in trans spaces is this bizarre attitude that trans women are doomed to this miserable life of clockability and will never be able to pass as cis women thus they must accept that their life will be nothing but pain and suffering. and that's just very much not true! i know plenty of trans women who "pass" or who are happy with their bodies, who have jobs they love and friends and family who love them, who have a community that supports and celebrates them. and it has just always rubbed me the wrong way that people think they're helping trans women by presenting their existence as Inevitably Miserable when all it does is terrify closeted trans girls who think they're better off never coming out or transitioning, or better off dying. like. we have to understand that these narratives we create, the idea of the perpetually suffering trans woman and the lonely isolated trans man, are absolutely driving people to suicidal ideation. and if we give a shit about trans people, we should be changing these narratives.

[villainintern]

A compiled FAQ of things people are commonly curious about. ⬇️

(For the TL,DR short answers- skim the bolded words!)

Will I be able to save my game?

Absolutely. The next demo update will be exported to HTML- so you'll have checkpoints, and it'll autosave in your browser.

How often will the demo update?

As fast as I can write it, every few months on average! This is a passion project of mine, I'm working on it whenever I have free time (and daydreaming about it during my other responsibilities). However, I am a full time college student with a part time job, and also a part time actual internship, so I usually have some other thing on my front burner. But I want to get this thing done ASAP so I can submit it for publishing!

Help, I'm stuck at my desk computer!

This isn't the end! You've reached a mini-puzzle. Hints and solution here.

How will my super-abilities upgrade/change as the game progresses?

Your eventual power ups will happen on their own. They look a lot like "upgraded" versions of the initial abilities- sort of spin-offs, similar but stronger and with a twist to keep things interesting. It unfortunately won't be a branching choice (too many ability combos to track) but it will vary quite a bit depending on your initial power picks.

Genoid players will experience a mutation. Dormant genes will activate, causing a physical transformation. You won't look too different, but you'll certainly feel different. Stronger.. wilder?

The cyborg skill tree is gated by how much energy you can store in your power banks. This improves as you get better batteries. Your character will tinker on themselves, improving old augments and adding new ones to account for weaknesses.

Will there be romance? Who are the romantic options?

Villain Intern is very character driven, you'll be able to have all sorts of unique and varying dynamics with the people you meet. Your romantic endeavors are absolutely a part of this (so yes!).

Currently, I have optional full romance storylines planned for R. Sullivan, Peter Hyde, Dr. Elaine Foster, T9-670, and Blink.

My goal is to integrate these with the main plot as much as possible, so they feel like natural progressions rather than side-stories. For the less inclined, and to encourage interaction with the whole cast, you can also forge friendships, make frenemies, enemies, recruit minions, swear allegiances, develop a nemesis, become a sidekick to bigger villains/heroes, etc!

How long will the finished game be? Is there a sequel/series planned?

Personally, I think an interactive fiction game needs at least 400,000 words to really feel complete. So expect that, and probably more! As for the sequel- yes, that's in my outlines. By the end of this game, your character will either be promoted, defect to the superhero company, or fail to do either for various reasons. So naturally we'll need to see how that plays out- an internship is just the first chapter of your career, after all.

Will this game be screen reader friendly? Will you add a screen reader mode?

Yes, accessibility is important to me! It's difficult to implement in beta, with so much of the text and code in flux, but when things are finalized I'll go back and add a complete screen reader mode. There will be more updates & info posts for this down the line.

I have a question/concern that isn't listed here.

Please stop my my inbox! I'm grateful for everyone's generous interest, feedback, and bug testing, and I'm more than happy to chat about whatever. Also, it's fun to get mail. 💌

[lunalucykat]

what's your favorite thing about your favorite character?

Crazy ask tbh!! Cause this gives me free rein to talk about any favorite character in anything and that's so many options!!!

(Also I've been sat here staring at this question in my inbox for a week cause I was like, who do I even choose??? lol)

After a long and hard deliberation I said, Fuck it! Might as well pick the characters that I have been rotating in my head for the past few months. Sorry I'm gonna be a little One Piece lover for a minute because legit the storylines are SO good and I love SO many of the characters!

I'm gonna give love to the ASL brothers because I love each and every one of them so much (even though I haven't even met Sabo, but I know about him, so it's chill lol)

One Piece spoilers below if you care, also I anticipate this getting absurdly long lmao

Like, I am actually sorry how long this got, cause I went off on some tangents. But if you give me a platform to talk about One Piece I am Going to TALK about One Piece (and, I think, get off prompt way too often.) That being said, I am still REALLY sorry about the WALL of text. You don't have to - nor should you - read this whole thing. orz

Ah, yes. The Age, Sex, Location brothers (lmao I feel like this joke shows my age cause I would make this joke, but TJ would make the joke as: the Am.erican Sign Language Brothers.)

This is definitely more than you asked for because you asked what is your favorite thing about your favorite character, but I'm doing things about characters, so... sorry lol!

Sibling characters are so important to me in general, and any group of siblings are usually gonna be some of my favorites (e.g. Sand Siblings from Naruto.) I have two older siblings and one younger so that might contribute to why, but I usually love the dynamics. And I love these guys all separately and as a package deal.

Ace- TBH what's not to love about Ace? He is the epitome of cool! Everybody wants to be him (or maybe I'm just projecting, but GOD he's so cool!) He is Literally The Cool Older Brother, and I love that for him. He also sort of has the cowboy look too, so that gives him bonus points lol!

Something I really love about Ace is that he loves so fiercely and it's obvious in everything he does. It's the way he's protective over Luffy and makes sure he gives his baby brother some way to find him again if he ever needs. But it's also the way he freaks out when he realizes said baby brother comes to rescue him when he's in a dire situation. He definitely has eldest child vibes in that regard; giving help but not accepting help. It feels like a very eldest sibling thing to do. It's also the way he adamantly refuses to call his biological father his dad, and insists that his father is Whitebeard because he was the man who took him in and cared for him as his son. He literally states it to the world. He loves Whitebeard and won't let anybody tell him that he's not his father.

He is literally all about his family. And that feels stupid to say cause this whole show is about found/ forged families, but Ace wears his heart on his sleeve and isn't afraid to show just how much he loves his family, not only in his actions and words, but also in the things he wears. He's so sentimental that he keeps all of his most precious people with him in some sort of memento. (Some of these are more canonical than others, but most of them you can read a certain way and it makes sense, so bear with me).

The most obvious (and canon) is his back tattoo which is Whitebeard's symbol. He literally calls it his pride and displays it as such. That's his father, and he is happy to show it off. (I don't know if these next few are canonically correct, but the vast majority of fans agree on their symbolism connecting to his other family members.) The red beads around his hat and necklace are the same as the ones his foster mom, Dadan, wears, so they're likely a memento to remember her by. The next one I think has a lot of legitimacy to it, because for some reason I think some people still don't believe it, but the X'd out S in his arm tattoo ASCE is to remember Sabo by. (Textual evidence for this is the "what if" cover story Oda drew where the brothers were never separated and in that scenario Ace's arm tattoo it literally just written as ACE.) The X through the S I think has a double meaning because when he got it Sabo was presumed dead so it could be crossed out because his younger brother was gone, but also the X through the S could be because that was Sabo's mark. Like, it was his jolly roger when he set out to sea. Some people also like to say the little buttons on Ace's hat resemble a goggle-like appearance to mimic Sabo's goggles on his top hat, which I think is cute, but maybe not as legitimate lol. That just leaves Luffy. I'm not gonna lie, there's not a lot on his design that points specifically to Luffy, probably because he was confident he'd see him around. But if we wanna stretch we could say maybe his hat symbolizes Luffy (and probably Sabo too). He got a hat so he could join his little brothers' cool hat club lmao!!

The Symbolism on this boy goes WILD!!! He LITERALLY wears his heart on his sleeve, or back, or around his neck, or his arm, or his head lol!

I also love that he's also susceptible to sibling dumbassery. I'm talking about that shit where you're polite and respectable towards peers and shit, but the moment you're around your siblings you revert to little gremlin mode. Cause Ace met all the Strawhats and was like "Hello, yes, nice to meet you. I am Luffy's respectable older brother, thank you so much for taking care of him all this time, I know he's a lot to handle :)" But when he was alone with Luffy literally 5 minutes ago he was like "What's up fucker? Wanna arm wrestle you little bitch baby?" It's hilarious. I love it.

Also his character design is hot! What can I say? lol! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Sabo- I am actually insane about Sabo and it makes no sense cause I haven't even met the dude yet! Like, I'm looking for some excuse to change my icon to him but it's going to be like at least 3 whole arcs until I meet him so idk lol (that probably won't stop me lmao! Sanji's days are numbered lol)

So I haven't technically met Sabo yet, but I do know a bit about him (because my brain decided to snatch him up into my "3 more of these little blonde bitches club [consists of Sanji, Sabo, and Rosinante/Corazon (WHOM I ALSO HAVEN'T MET BUT I LOVE HIM)]" and now I know more about him than I did like 4 months ago) so I'll talk about what I do know.

Erm, it's him being the middle child (as a middle child myself I heavily fuck with middle children characters.) As a kid he looks mostly well-adjusted and like, the peacekeeper of the three, but as a young adult he looks literally so unhinged, and that's the middle child experience babeeeyyyyyyyyy!!! (I'm only half kidding lol)

I also headcannon him as aroace. It's so easy to do that with any of Oda's characters tbh because he doesn't really focus on romance (which I'm thrilled about, because it means he's most likely not gonna do that thing that every mangaka does that everyone fucking hates which is to pair off characters who have no chemistry together or never interacted in canon, but they get married in the end just because he needs everyone to end up with someone and have a family in order to continue the story, but with the kids this time! I am literally looking at Naruto. Cause when the fuck did Choji and Karui ever interact? Literally never. Also, God. Don't EVEN get me started with Sasuke and Sakura.) ANYWAY!!!!! The way Oda writes his story makes it easy to headcannon characters as aroace, and I do with Sabo at least cause I'm also aroace and he's one of my favies, so.... rejoice! Aroace be upon ye! :) Idk, he just gives the vibe :) Also it's funny to make the joke that they're all "Ace."

He's also got that steampunk drip. Love that for him. Go whiteboy, go! Not only does he dress like he's smart, but I'm almost CERTAIN he IS the smartest of the three brothers. I mean like, he probably has similar qualities about him that he shares with Ace and Luffy in terms of general dumbassery, but he definitely gives the vibe that he Knows what the fuck he's doing. Probably helps that I'm pretty sure he was the only one of the three that received a proper education lol. But I love the potential for the duality of him ping-ponging between being really smart and doing something really dumb and reckless.

I think Sabo was the softer of the older brothers. Like, Ace wanted to check in on Luffy and make sure he was okay and everything, but also he and Luffy seemed rougher towards each other (literally arm wrestling upon first meeting again after 3 years of not seeing each other.) Sabo gives the vibe that instead of armwrestling upon seeing each other, he would instead give hugs. I LOVE soft interactions with siblings just as much as I love interactions with them roasting the shit out of each other, and I think Sabo brings the softness needed. I mean, had he and Ace interacted in their early 20s I think there would definitely be sibling ribbing, but I guess I'll never know that for sure :) :) :) I'd've loved to see it though! :) :) :)

But at least Sabo can be soft and baby the baby brother. And you know what? Luffy deserves hugs! And I'm sure Sabo does too! And hell! Throw Ace in there too! He also deserves hugs!

He's also part of the Revolutionary Army, that much I know for sure, so he is absolutely out there doing some much needed shit (Luffy also does liberation every now and then, but he doesn't exactly go out of his way to do it like the R.A. does, he more happens upon it as he goes lol) And we've already met some cool-ass R.A. members (IVA!!!), so he's in good company. Also - side tangent - but Luffy adopted him as his brother, Garp adopted him as his grandson, and Dragon essentially adopted him as a son, so all I'm sayin' is..... Monkey D. Sabo?????? (eyes emoji) [I'm on desktop so I can't do emojis]

Anyway! Can't wait to meet Sabo! Can't wait to see him be absolutely baller!! Can't wait for him to see Luffy again!!! Can't wait to find more reasons to love him than the bare minimum I know about him!!!!

Luffy- Luffy is literally The best MC of any shōnen anime ever and nothing can change my mind about that. I have watched nearly 500 episodes of One Piece and Luffy is one of my top favorite characters, and that says something cause the MC's are usually never even close to my top favorites. Ever.

Like, I watched all 720 episodes of Naruto, and Team 7 (Naruto, Sasuke, Sakura) are some of my least favorite guys in the show, I'm not gonna lie!! Like, I don't hate Naruto or Sakura, but because of their obsession with Sasuke (worst character, sorry Sasuke stans) it makes them SO boring to me. (I could so easily rant about Naruto, but this isn't about him lol, but I'm just sayin' you hit Shippuden and he gets real dull. And just to compare- 500 episodes of Naruto counts the first 220 from the original and then 280 of Shippuden so 500 in is a little over halfway through Shippuden, so I was basically over Naruto as an MC by then. ANYWAY! Enough about him!)

There's so much to love about Luffy. He comes out of the gate being Iconic as fuck in episode 1 and he STAYS that way! He stays that way but he also grows, but even after character growth moments he stays the same goofy guy in the end and I love that! He has a death grip around embodying joyous whimsy. It probably helps that he starts his journey already knowing who he is and what he wants. There is little in the way of self-doubt, and I love the confidence he has in himself and his dream and in others.

I also love that sometimes he's a little rude-ass! Okay, well he's blunt, so sometimes he comes off as rude, but it's funny as fuck. I also love that he displays many AuDHD symptoms, it makes him feel more relatable in some ways.

He's also just so emotionally intelligent. I mean, can he read the room most of the time? Not to save his goddamn life! But is he a great judge of character? Always. He is a ride or die homie! He often feels overly optimistic, but he's also so realistic in those tougher situations or decisions he has to make and I appreciate that kind of depth in a character, and it's SO important for an MC to have those traits! He knows when it's okay to be silly and when he HAS to be serious. And he doesn't mind relying on his friends!!! I see so many main characters insisting they can do something on their own, but Luffy admits time and time again that he DOES need to rely on his friends because they have skills he doesn't! He lifts others up and values them for the qualities they don't always see in themselves! I love him so much.

HE IS ASEXUAL!!! Like it's actually been very heavily implied and there is contextual evidence for it in canon. For example: he has these interactions with Boa Hancock whose Devil Fruit power turns horny people to stone (yeah), and when she tried using it on Luffy LITERALLY nothing happens to him. Aro/Ace King!!! (Again, I'm also aroace so that's why this scores big points with me!) Luffy will never go to horny jail, and good for him!

I also think there is a subtle but noticeable shift in his behavior when his brothers are around (well I can only really use Ace as an example here). But in a different way than Ace, because Luffy is the baby. Like Ace goes gremlin mode, and I think Luffy slips a bit into baby mode. It's harder to see the difference because Luffy is always kind of silly, but when Ace was around he feels a little more like he's clinging to his brother in a way. And to be fair Ace sort of lets him. Like in Alabasta before Luffy realized Ace was there, he was doing his damndest to use the one braincell he has to think through his predicament when encountering Smoker, even if it meant just running away from a fight he probably wanted to have but knew he couldn't win so he didn't engage. But the moment Ace stepped in and told Luffy not to worry about Smoker he was kind of like "oh yippie! :) Okay! Yayyy! <3" and just did what big bro said.

Idk how he'd be with Sabo, but I think he'd be even MORE of a baby around him because I feel like Sabo would let him get away with it more than Ace would.

Anyway!

I just like imagining the siblings having fun and doing sibling things together and everyone is happy and alive :) I love them! I I love the potential! I love what we could have haaaaaaaaaaad!!!!

Sorry this is so long. I love One Piece if you couldn't tell. And this could've been WAY longer. I really, really tried to hold back. But, erm, Your Honor, I love One Piece... I know some crimes can never be forgiven -_-'

[ryuichirou]

Hey ryuichi, as an artist, how do you feel about Ai art? Do you think that Ai is going to replace artists? Do you think that Ai artists are real artists?

I'm curious to know your opinion on this matter.

Sorry for the late reply, Anon! I wanted to give you a more or less nuanced reply, so it took me some time to think about this topic.

I’ll start with the easy one: no, AI art isn’t going to replace all artists and it’s not going to completely eradicate art as we know it, because art doesn’t exist solely for the practical purposes. As long as people enjoy and feel passionate about making art, art is going to exist in one form or another. But that’s just stating the obvious.

And while there are people who are better or worse at coming up with prompts for the AI, as long as they don’t do any additional work based on the AI-generated image, I don’t consider it being art. I think art is about skill, taste and personality, and this simply isn’t it.

Are people going to lose jobs because of AI art? Unfortunately, it already happens, but it also doesn’t mean that artists are doomed and this is some kind of apocalypse. It’s very important to consider the scale of things, the possible developments, etc. Here are some points to consider…

First of all, if we’re talking about personal commissions and clients that opt to use AI instead of commissioning an artist for their project (or personal use), I wouldn’t say that it’s too much of a loss. I feel like this is exactly the type of clients who don’t tend to appreciate artists’ work and pay them fairly anyway, otherwise they wouldn’t even consider AI as an option. Many of these “clients” would never commission an artist anyway, so they’re not even a part of this client pool. I know that money is money, and some artists would gladly take even a low-paying job from a customer that often doesn’t treat them well (I’ve been there and speak from my personal experience back when I started to offer my commission services), but I am an idealist and think that we shouldn’t spend our time and energy on someone who doesn’t see any value in our work anyway. Not everyone has the luxury of throwing away people who pay you at least something, of course, these artists still need to eat, so that last statement remains an idealistic take from me, keep that in mind.

And if we’re talking about corporations that use AI instead of hiring artists, while it is a problem, I also feel like it’s going to backfire somehow – it kinda does already. Not necessarily in terms of the company getting backlash, but in terms of the lack of quality control over the AI art (if you don’t have any actual artists on board, how are you going to know if the art works or not?) and some other unexpected reasons that are definitely going to pop up.

AI is definitely going to transform the way we think about art and art-related jobs in general. Some jobs might get lost forever, but it happens all the time – there are other brand-new types of art-jobs that are going to start emerging out of thin air. Just like photography and Photoshop influenced the market and art in general, AI is going to do just that.

I’ll note that I don’t think companies are going to stop using AI altogether at any point of the near future though; it’s a very powerful and cost-effective tool, there is no way they are letting it go. AI is absolutely here to stay, and it’s going to evolve and become better and better, scarily better. But this is how I think we should approach it:

People whose work is used for the AI’s learning pool should abso-fucking-lutely give their consent to their work being used, or even better, be compensated for their participation. If there is a new AI that makes a point out of the participation in the learning process being voluntary and well-paid, I think it’d change the dynamic between artists and AI – so far it’s just stealing from them.

Ideally, AI should be used as a base and not the final product. Actual artists could get inspired by it during the brainstorming stage or work over it.

Whoever posts, produces or distributes content that was created with the help of an AI, should absolutely mark it accordingly. In my perfect world, there’re going to be laws about this lol In general, the whole thing needs to be reflected in law, so far it’s way too easy to abuse.

Not only marked, AI generated images should be banned from being sold lol You can press that button and type all the key words all you want, but the result is just a free image that anyone can use and cannot be monetized. I believe this final point would make the majority of AI users just abandon their desire to use it in general – if there’s no profit for them, they’ll drop out, and AI art can be used as a tool like it’s supposed to be.

As you can see, I have avoided saying that people who use AI art are “artists” because I don’t consider them artists. If they don’t transform anything and don’t bring anything new to the table, I, the most important person on this planet, will refuse to give them that title lol

As far as I know, actors and writers have achieved some guarantees against the use of AI during their strike..? I haven’t looked into it, so I don’t know. Also please, keep in mind that I’m mostly talking about illustrations, because this is what I do. AI affects other types of art too, and there might be nuance there that I’m not mentioning here.

In general, I don’t want to demonize AI, because I feel like it’s not a problem on itself, it’s the way people use it that’s brings problems for all of us. This is a very new technology, and we don’t know how to handle it just yet mostly because for the lack of the law system regulating it, this is why there are so many opportunities to abuse it.

Also also, when the novelty of the AI art wears off, we might end up with the resurgence of appreciation for “real human art” or something. We are waaaaay too prone to nostalgia not to go “god I miss it when actual people designed logos” one day, and believe me, whenever it happens, the companies are going to market their stuff as the REAL HUMAN ART by the REAL HUMAN PEOPLE so much that we’re going to get sick of it in 5 minutes lol. But hey, maybe it’ll end up being a reason to pay artists more.

Thank you for reading such a long reply! I don’t want for my blog to turn into a discussion board, so sorry in advance if you address this topic in future asks to give me links or examples and I won’t reply to you, but it depends on the number of asks. I’ll look through everything on my own.

[shewhowas39]

chapter title: "The Kids Are All Fucked Up" chapter summary: in which Shadowheart has another confession, the gang learns more about what they are up against, and June doesn't know if she should open the spooky evil book. also June and Astarion makeout. pairing: Astarion x June (Dark Urge)/OC content warnings: sleepwalking, mind control (via tadpole), intrusive thoughts, brief descriptions of corpses, kissing with light dom/sub dynamics

A/N: this one finally gets a little bit more into the actual plot after that brief interlude in the wine cellar. but as promised, we're in the kissing phase of the fic now baby.

***

PREVIEW

And now night has fallen, she sits by the campfire, and the book is still in her hands, still urging her to open it. 

The Necromancy of Thay.

She knows the history of Thay and it’s infamous Red Wizards. It seems somewhere in her forgotten past, she had studied the land and its undead supreme ruler. She knows that this book likely contains knowledge coveted by many mages and scholars. She knows that when she’s touching it, she can hear the wails of dead, even when her mind is still here in the present.

She knows she is desperate to open it. 

And that she is the last person who should be allowed to. 

So it is perhaps a good thing that the book is magically sealed, its secret’s kept safe behind a cover with a small empty slot. 

“You know, I’ve heard it’s easier to read a book if you open it,” Astarion says as he comes to sit down next to her. 

Everyone else has gone to bed, opting to sleep in their tents rather than around the fire. Astarion is on first watch - with the caveat that he actually has to watch and not go hunt - and June is keeping him company. Because the other option is sleeping, which she is afraid to do.

“Can’t.” June taps the empty slot. “Magically sealed. Don’t got the key.”

Astarion purses his lips. “We’ll have to find a way.”

“I don’t know that we ought to open it at all. Might be better to keep it sealed.”

“You’re joking, right?” Astarion sounds almost outraged. “That book likely contains information on powerful dark magic! Forbidden knowledge! Profane rituals! What do you mean it might be better not to open it?!”

“You’re kinda making my point for me.” 

“Ugh! First you don’t want to use the tadpole to bend people to your will and now you don’t want to open the book full of unholy arcane secrets?” He huffs and pouts, staring into the fire. “You’re no fun.” 

“That ain’t what you were saying yesterday.”

Astarion glances at her out of the corner of his eye before twisting to meet her gaze more fully. “Still thinking about that kiss, I see.”

[transannabeth]

hi! i love your art style!! i was wondering if you had any tips on practicing figure drawing. i understand the like “a person is about 7 heads in height, and this is where joints should go on the chart,” but i find when trying to draw dynamic figures, i end up lengthening limbs to the point of uncanny valley. i know practice is Thee One Big Thing, but i was wondering if you had something more discreet. like practice is the staircase but are there any steps you’d recommend to getting to the top of the staircase, which has “get a little better at figure drawing” at the top? thanks so much!

ahhh thank you so much!!! i'm so glad you like my art!!

my advice for figure drawing is still 'practice' but maybe the advice i have for practice will help out a little? i guess we'll find out aldskfj

first though, proportion rules are super helpful for more static poses, but can definitely be harder to use in active ones. i actually learned most of mine from cyberchase (thank you pbs kids) hilariously enough, but others you can sorta figure out for yourself just by seeing what is (approximately) the same size!

for arms my big one is always that from your shoulder to elbow is about the same length as your head and neck. and then from your elbow to your wrist is slightly shorter than that. you can test this for yourself by holding up your arm and resting your forearm on your head, or touching your fingers to your shoulder! of course, this isn't always true for everyone, so you can play with that, but if your arms are looking too long, that's my big one!

for legs, i do something kind of similar, where if i pull my leg to my chest, for me, my leg comes just past my armpit, so my hip joint to knee is slightly smaller than my torso (and same for the bottom of my leg). again, this isn't exact, but i find it easier to do how bigger body parts are proportional to each other (sections of leg to torso, parts of arm to head) opposed to like 7 heads for the full body, and i find it a little easier to use for poses and moving limbs around

for practice i super recommend both references and drawing from life!! if there are any classes near you with a live model, i personally recommend it because i both think it's a lot of fun (i like the mindset long study sessions like that put me in) and i think that it gives you a lot of good experiences with body types and poses and angles you might not think of!

since those are not always accessible though, drawing from photos is also great! the site line of action is my go to, because it allows you to set different a time limit for your drawings and gives you options like the models' ages, genders, and if they're clothed or nude. since you have no other control over what images you get, it gives you poses that you might not've tried before!

(this site also has expressions (i love that section), environments, hands and feet, and animals!)

also reference photos are my best friend (i say, not using them as much as i should). there are SO MANY people who post reference photos for artists doing all sorts of poses, with all sorts of props, and it's great. the one that i can immediately find is adorastock which i highly recommend clicking through even for some inspiration!

if you can't find what you're looking for, taking pictures of yourself or people around you is always something you can do as well. i am constantly taking pictures of my hands because i can't figure out the right angle of everything. for the piece of leesia and teddy where leesia is lunging with knives, i took a photo of myself at like 3 am to get that one. for my final project in a drawing class, i took a picture of my sister wrapped in a bed sheet because i couldn't figure out how to make the fabric draping look right

piggybacking off that one, those final pieces were actually based on john william waterhouse's paintings. (the assignment was to i think remake/modernize a piece) i think doing studies of other people's art and even tracing sometimes, can be really beneficial. i know there are a lot of thoughts about tracing, but i think that if you just don't post it... it's fine. older, famous artists have studies and redrawings done all the time of their work (j.c. leyendecker is a favorite for people's studies)

so yeah!! that's all the advice i've currently got. and also... sometimes proportions....are a little fake. sometimes it's just your style. or it just kinda...looks better wrong. a lot of my drawings of people in long dresses have them with legs that are actually way too long because i like how the longer skirt looks. so none of the rules are hard and fast

good luck!! i hope something in this answer helps you out a little bit!!

[vlovers19]

Honestly, after reading your responses it feels like you are heavily projecting your feelings on vmin specially taehyung. Just say you don't like jimin's album because it goes against the narrative of vmin being real . Taehyung is already getting a lot of hate & you are only fueling it more by implying that he hated jimin's album.

chapter 2 has showed all of us that we know nothing about the members at all . If you are following BTS for a long period of time you will know that there is definitely a huge difference b/w there online & offline dynamics & their is no denying the fact that BTS do partake in fanservice. The only way we can tell if their bonds are geniune or not is by looking at their offline interactions, which we are privileged to see in the ch. 2 a lot more.

Based on what we have seen for the past month, it's clear that vmin are not in talking terms with each other at all . As heartbreaking as it is but it's the truth & we have so many evidences for that . Let me add jikook also. It's so ironic how vminkook used to be portrayed as the closest duo within the group on cam but the reality is jimin is more closer with the hyung line specially hobi. Acc. To jimin's own word after the break he was mostly in contact with Hobi & Yoongi & it actually shows .

It's not even about taehyung 's bare minimum support to jimin's album which borthered me the most, it was actually him admitting in the live that for the past weeks he was only doing Netflix and chill in his home ,which means he was free all this time but still chooses not to support jimin in any way. It's basically shows his priorities.He can go to concerts , meet wooga squad , visit jungkook's house at the middle of the night but supporting jimin is where he draws the line. Other members who are hella busy can show up to cheer jimin but his best friend who has all the free time would rather sleep. I mean i have no words & if this isn't enough taehyung doesn't even know about the jimin summoning dance, which by the way jimin has himself posted on Instagram. Goes to show that he was not even invested in jimin's content to begin with.

Vmin are also not talking to each other on phone. Why?? Because in the jhope's Bangtan Bomb jimin was caught asking taehyung that his hair got longer to which taehyung replied that he didn't cut his hair ( this & some other parts are not translated by the company but some Army's did it) This whole conversation is self explanatory i.e vmin are not in talking terms with each other. Also they were lowkey avoiding/ ignoring eachother in the video specially jimin.

All their interactions for the past months are pretty much one sided . Jimin never replies to any of the taehyung's comments but he did reply to other members.

Also the whole narrative that they are private cause of MS is bullshit because at the end of the day they are all publically friends, i don't get how you supporting your friend's album is going to be considered as romantic . Also if they really don't want any attention towards them , don't you think that acting normal with each other is the best option cause by deliberately ignoring eachother is getting them more attention by the fans. Honestly, i don't know what's happened b/w them but it is definitely not looking good at all .

I hope they overcome whatever they are going through.

Oh my Goodness. You really are invested in what you see on camera. I have been a fan of Bts since 2017. That's a pretty long time to know their dynamics especially in public. You obviously have your own opinions and, nothing can change your mind. You are head strong deep in your beliefs and from the way you sounded, you have not been in the fandom for long so there are certain things you don't know and if people want to miscontrue my words about Taehyung hating Jimin then they can do so for their own benefit. It's not my concern. I have already said what I said. It's up to them to interpret it how they see fit

But I'll tell you again, Jimin and Taehyung are private. They have not changed. Jimin hardly ever commented on Taehyung's live and it didn't start today. I can prove to you that these people aren't at odds as a lot of people would think. Now you said Jimin saw Taehyung and pointed out his hair had gotten longer. To you, it was proof they don't talk. Yet, it wasn't that long they all had dinner with the rest of the members when Jin was on leave. Are you trying to tell me he didn't notice his hair length then? Taehyung attended Celine event not so long ago and if you can notice carefully, the hair length isn't that different from now. Even if Jimin hadn't seen his pictures from Instagram, they went viral and of course, he must have seen them just like how a fan asked him during one of his recent live how he felt seeing Jk's calvin klein's photoshoot. He replied that he saw both Jungkook and Taehyung's photoshoots and they were both very handsome. This means he follows what they do. So are you saying Jimin wouldn't have noticed Taehyung's hair length?

I recently watched that vminkook live they did in LA. Taehyung and Jimin had nothing to talk about so Jimin just randomly commented on how Taehyung's hair had grown. I can't upload the moment because it would waste my time trying to find but if you have time, go check out the live. Jimin must have said that to find something to talk about with Taehyung.

Taehyung during his last live commented about how he worked out in the company. He has been into fitness lately which could mean it wasn't the first time he had worked out there. So in all that time, Jimin didn't see him. Come on. He doesn't know the Park Jimin summoning trend? Who is he decieving? Maybe others but not me! He probably must have misunderstood the sentence as people asking that they wanted to see Jimin.

I'm not a seer to know what is really going on with them or why Taehyung disregards Jimin according to you but one thing is for certain. Things are not as simple as one might think. I have already explained myself in the previous posts but obviously you must have skipped past them because you didn't get anything at all from what I said and simply continued with your own opinion. Anyway, I have nothing else to say about this. Thank you.

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[random-conspiracy]

yey! the desk cop is here! /j /j /j thanks pal

-how’d you get the idea for the rotating baskets instead of a traditional shelf/wall/dresser type thing? would everything you put in them need to have that immediate access?

TAROT and medieval bookwheels! hahsahs, specifically the Wheel of Fortune card. The main desk was the first desing, all the other pieces were thought later and I wanted something dramatic! Something to give that visual and dynamic kick to the collection.

You don't actually need everything in inmediate access, that's why I made her sister, the more casual chest of drawers to keep all the thinks you don't actually want to see all the time (that's why the drawers have such bright colors! Easier color-memory-content association).

-i like the optional shelves that are higher in the main desk area itself, what was your idea in making those? are there certain projects you’d need a higher workspace for (i.e. jewelry making maybe) or did you just want the alternative height for a possible higher chair?

Oh! Those boards are mean to be moved from the shelves to be work area, not used in that very place. HOWEVER, the upper area of the desk's box is a secondary work area at standing up height, for when you want to do shit without being sittin' all the time.

-i really like the sunny feeling of everything, what made you choose this color of wood for the walls and desk? is it your ideal texture/colors for everything, was there a limited budget, etc? would you change colors given an unlimited palette to pick from? (i’m a colorful maximalist so i genuinely get curious as to why ppl enjoy minimalism, that’s not to say it looks bad ofc)

The budget ahshasha. Plywood is cheap and easy to use, also it gives a very nice wood final surface. Minimalistic but organic, personalizable without lacking personality. I'm a hugh maximalist too but since the original idea was a desk designed for an architecture student I needed to create something that wouldn't distract from the main focus.

But you can already see that maximalism is something beyond bold colors and kitsch textures. I have a fucking wheel ahshhsahs.

I'd like to experiment with other textures and colors in new projects, maybe something more dramatic, more futuristic, even something on the lines of art nouveau or solarpunk. I like the concept of a desk, since it is your main creative/work area if you have something dull you will be inspired by that dullness, but something too intense will act like a blackhole, trapping you into a specific mindset.

-if you needed to add a bulletin board/reminder section/calendar/idk Hanging Things section, where would it go/what shape would it be? the clock has a really distinct alternative shape so i think it would be cool to see either something similar or inverse

I thought about it. I tried some prototypes with an extra panel in the main desk's sides, but it was just too much. If anything, the high drawer is full of empty space on its sides. Put some plywood wings of differente shapes there and you have all the modifiable useful space you need.

And the clock is not mine ahshahsahs. I don't know who did it.

How would I make a clock...?

Mmmmm, how curious. I adore the archetypical shape of a clock but honestly who gives a fuck about hands, my time is money and I want some straight numbers. However, what is actually "time"? To jump from 12pm to 4pm doing nothing? I don't want some macabre shit like an hourglass counting seconds back but I DEFINITELY would like something to hold me in.

I think we're seeing only the small picture and that's part of the problem.

What about a clock that shows not only the minutes, but the hours in the day and the days in the week, AND the weeks in the month? HHahashas

"The Hours", the hours can defend themselves, they are nasty ladies, unless you're looking for the golden apples you have nothing to worry about. But the minutes? those are the real deal. I'd make a clock that shows you how many time you have actually left, and where you can place very visible deadlines. How many minutes left in the hour, hours in the day, days in the week, weeks in the month, even months in the year.

See the big picture.

Have control of your time.

Not just 4 round clocks side by side, maybe more like loading bars to keep that essence of the hourglass in a more intuitive way. Perhaps even in a circular concentric shape. And maybe, perhaps, the only hand in the center of the clock is you moving at the same speed and direction the loading bar is diminishing ahshas. And your deadlines and important dates reminders as smaller hands pointing in the exact date you need them (like, sorry for the reference, Molly Weasley's clock), with a classic and very visible set of numbers right in the center showing the actual time.

See the whole flow of time that goes from "now" to "then".

Maybe I'd make sketches later

Or maybe something more personalizable, like showing only the whole pack of hours that you have left

finished my stupid render

[takaraphoenix]

Ship game!! What about Nico and Will?? It’s pretty popular, but I don’t think I’ve seen you write much of it…

That's an interesting one in that I have vocalized my reasons for disliking it way back when it first became popular but instead of just linking that, it has been years so I think it's time for an updated version.

Firstly: This post is gonna be properly tagged and not crosstagged so if any shipper comes across it and feels the need to bitch about it, just don't; your lack of curating your own tumblr experience is not my problem! ;D

Now, there are three key factors that play into my dislike of this ship: How it was written, what it represents, how the fandom around it acts.

1. It’s rushed and uncomfortable

In BoO, it was incredibly rushed. They had literally five sentences of interactions before they walked into the literal sunset together. Five. It was just entirely born from Riordan's Noah's Ark Complex, where he just can't let people be single. The series was ending and he needed Nico to have an endgame so he rushed into some random romance with zero build-up.

The way their interactions went down was also severely uncomfortable for me. Will was acting so offended by Nico not wanting to go to camp and be friends in an entitled way that he had no right to be, he downright guilt-tripped Nico about how he had wanted to be friends. Nico has been just so severely traumatized at such a young age and his coping mechanism, as unhealthy as it was, was to run away and hide. Will acted like Nico not wanting to form attachments to people who could potentially leave him again was somehow just an Edgy Emo Decision and not a direct reaction to his trauma. His entire approach to Nico was basically all these hippie posts of "Don't have depression!! Just go out into the sun and stop being depressed!", which is already a bad take with non-medical people but he's supposed to be a doctor (and let's not get into the shadiness of him technically being Nico's doctor).

There is also an inherent "I can fix him" angle to this ship and to me, only few ship dynamics are more uncomfortable than that. If you want to fundamentally change a person's behavior and personality, you... don't actually want to be with this person.

Now, here's where my points overlap, because the following parts of their writing that bothers me also stand for what this ship fundamentally represents.

2. Solangelo is a queer ship written by and for straights

I'm a queer woman and as a queer woman, I want queer wish-fulfillment, not what straights want out of queerness. I'm kind of tired of that, I've been sitting through it for enough decades now. That's, of course, not to say that no straight writer can give proper queer representation, but far too often do straight writers - even the most well-meaning ones - project straight desires of queerness into their queer representation.

Let me explain that closer through this ship.

Nico's been in love with Percy for years and I'm going to do my best to not hijack this post with some Percico agenda; that's not what this his about, this isn't some "my ship is better than your ship" ship-war nonsense. It's simply a canonical fact that Nico has had romantic feelings for another character for years.

A character who, in this medium, is heterosexual. And if you're queer, you've been there. In love with your straight best friend. It's a cliche, but it's a cliche for a reason.

We have also all been well-meaningly rejected by said straight friend.

And here's the straight desires for you: The queer person who was in love with a straight person just immediately stops having those feelings and will then as quickly as possible fall in love with the next queer person they meet to be happy and no longer uncomfortably in love with a straight person, because that thought makes the straights uncomfortable.

Queer wish-fulfillment would be for Percy to return those feelings, for the queer character to get his first love, to not be rejected. That thing queer teens always dreamed about for themselves.

Aside from the wish-fulfillment angle, the pacing is another problem. Let me repeat, Nico was in love for years. But a five sentence conversation with Will once causes a crush on Will and we see him physically turn away from Percy and toward Will just immediately to rebound and actually fall out of love with Percy and in love with Will. Anyone who's ever been unlucky in love will attest to just how unrealistic and ridiculous the pacing here is.

It's also straight queerness in another respect; Nico has been the first ever queer character we meet in that world. He loves a straight guy - and to get over that, we introduce the second queer character. Because heaven forbid there are multiple queers to pick from. No, in straight-written queer romances, there is always that one main queer and then they introduce a second one and the two just immediately hit it off and develop a romance like all a queer person needs to form attraction to someone is the confirmation that the other person shares your sexuality.

Also the notable gay guy on gay guy ship here, whereas the more queer-wish-fulfillment option would have also included more nuance to the queer experience, because Percy doesn't have to be heterosexual just because he has only been with girls so far. It's a very old-fashioned - think 90s and early 2000s - kind of straight-written queerness that there are only exactly two homosexuals and that those two homosexuals then pair up.

And, listen, I'm not immune to these outdated straight-written queers entirely, I have many such ships that I grew up with that I am still fond of because they were groundbreaking at that time and they weren't outdated yet back when they happened in said 90s and early 2000s. I am however a grown woman now and just like I have grown, so has queer rep so I am not as easily baited into falling onto my knees in gratitude for canon rep. You have to go with the times. And this ship, by all that is given to us, is just entirely outdated straight-written rep.

Which, I mention earlier that even straight-written rep can be good. If the author tries. Riordan doesn't really try though; he does the bare minimum when he writes any of his rep - and there have been many, many more qualified voices being very vocal about his depiction of people of color and, as a woman, I've been vocal about his depiction of women. I don't want to derail this post with all of that, but I do think that it bears mentioning that Riordan doing rep but only doing a bare minimum and not putting in the necessary work to deepen the representation he wants to give is a repeating pattern that has been pointed out many times by now.

(I’d also like to point out that no, it is not just the ship and not just the listed instances that make it straight-written rep for straights. It’s Nico’s entire queer arc, starting with his forced coming out. A severely traumatizing event that is completely brushed over because the straight author doesn’t understand the impact this has on queer people. Not to mention the framework; Nico’s coming out isn’t Nico’s story, it happens in Jason’s POV, it is given to us through the POV of the straight bystander who gets to be Best Ally by assuring Nico that being gay is okay. This kind of coming out is not a queer wish-fulfillment, it’s a straight wish-fulfillment of getting to be the straight savior, the ally to show the gay the light of acceptance. And, additional to the ridiculous pacing of how fast Nico gets over his love for Percy, Nico also gets over years of internalized homophobia just because of, I don’t know, Jason’s few encouraging words and the fact that Will paid attention to him? For a gay kid who was in the closet all his life, the nonchalant way in which he publicly confessed his crush to Percy at the end made absolutely no sense and was written as basically a joke, finished off with Nico literally high-fiving Percy’s girlfriend despite those two never having seen eye to eye before but this is straight wish-fulfillment so all straights are Super Allies, because that’s the way straights want to see themselves, even though Annabeth has shown before just how jealous she can be and she most definitely wouldn’t go around high-fiving people who confess to her boyfriend. Nothing about Nico’s queer arc in HoO felt natural or queer or satisfying.)

Sure, Solangelo on a surface level is big because it's a canon queer couple in a YA book-series and kudos for that and yay for the kids who get to grow up seeing queers in YA books, but I actually do think that kids growing up with books written in the 2010s shouldn't grow up with 1990s levels of representation, because the 2010s overall are actually at a far more nuanced and better level of representation when it comes to queerness. And I do reserve the right to quit on too straight-written and too outdated queer rep in a landscape where I can get more satisfying representation elsewhere; we don’t live in times anymore where you necessarily have to love every bit of rep because it’s the only one you get.

Now that we've gone through my first two gripes, let's wrap this up with the final point, because it also directly ties into this.

3. The new wave of antis hiding behind this ship

A huge part of the fandom is so busy kissing Riordan's ass solely for giving them queer rep at all they think that both the author and the ship are beyond flawless and that kind of attitude is not good. Just because an author includes rep doesn't make either perfect. Absolutely no one is beyond critique - especially not when said critique comes from the very people the author is representing. And even beyond any "valid" critique on the ship, quite frankly, someone should also be allowed to just not like it, without any reasons given at all.

But there is a certain... protective obsessiveness about this ship that doesn't allow a not liking. Very similar to how PJO bore this mindset around Perc/abeth already. It's okay to have OTPs, even OTPs that you have a blindspot for and just don't want to see any flaws in. It is however not okay to then go around attacking people who don't like the thing and mind their own business.

Solangelo's bred a new generation of antis in this fandom. And, particularly with the fact that this post too receives an "anti" tag, I feel like there needs to be a clarification (because tumblr likes to forget what actually makes an anti). Not liking something doesn't make you an anti, venting in properly tagged posts doesn't either; it's the people who harass others, who seek out the content they dislike to then complain that it even exists and who actively try to make others stop creating for it - those are antis.

And with Solangelo's popularity, there was a high rise in Percico antis, who sought it out, were unnecessarily nasty about it, harrassed creators and tried to enforce some kind of "Solangelo supremacy" that won't allow other ships for the characters.

I've been in fandom long enough to be perfectly aware that not all Solangelo shippers count into this category and that there are completely normal and nice Solangelo shippers, but this is a Venn diagram where the overlap between Solangelo shippers and antis is too large to not widely associate the nasty people with the ship itself. (I've been there myself, shipping the very ship behind which a fandom's antis all hid. The second-hand embarrassment of having these people give the ship a bad name is horrendous and I do feel bad for all the normal Solangelo shippers.)

The more often I encountered these people, who made Percico bad (sometimes in wildly ridiculous manners that bent and deliberately misinterpreted canon) and who in the same breath praised Solangelo high, the more tired I grew of that ship. It's a simple game of association, really. You see that linked to the gross and nasty behavior and you start associating the ship itself with that gross and nasty behavior - and with all the things I said before that already weighed into my dislike of the ship, this just was the final tipping point, really.

And that's it. That sums up why I dislike Solangelo. It was hastily rushed, uncomfortable in its execution, it is outdated rep that very much feels as straight-written as it factually is and it does not feel aimed at me as a queer person but rather at the straight audience and it has gathered a cult following of quite uncomfortable people who on their own would be reason enough to avoid it so you can avoid them.

Send me a ship and I will explain why I do or don't ship it