complainingatthevoid
Chronically bad at naming things
Writing nerd, science nerd, space nerd, all around nerd really. Occasional rambling about the Remedy-verse, Agents of SHIELD, and whatever else.Images grabbed from the NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day and rotated out whenever I get excited about new space pictures.
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This is a nice sign to look at. 10/10 for composition.
he looks so confident
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A story about many things, but mostly about the love between mothers and daughters, through the generations: born and chosen, lost and found.
The wind picked up, bright leaves sighing against the baby blue of a breakable sky. Daisy glanced across at May’s still profile.
“I’ll walk with you?”
May glanced at her -- was that a flicker of surprise? -- and nodded.
Coulson didn’t say anything, as they got out of the car. She saw them exchange a glance, brief and loaded and steady, familiar; May took the lead, hiking up the hilly ground. The flowers in her hand were splotches of color, her dark jeans and old leather jacket standing out stark against well-tended green. Daisy fell into step at her shoulder.
She’d known that May came here every once in a while. Not often. May hadn’t asked them to come along this time as much as she’d made it clear she didn’t mind if they did.
Daisy had negotiated her way into getting May to delegate some of her workload for the first time a few years ago, when there wasn't time for anything and May was busily pretending she wasn’t running herself ragged, trying to do a million things at once. She’d ended up on the phone with a list of florists local to various states, who’d made knowing aaah sounds when she said she was speaking on behalf of Melinda May. Lilies and roses, arrangements she didn’t even have to specify; she’d been handed a scrap of paper at least twenty years old, May’s spiky handwriting unchanged and the specifics unthinking in a way that told Daisy this had been routine for a very long time.
They came to a stop; Daisy's breath stuttered slowly out of her lungs, in spite of herself.
Continue reading on ao3.
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I fully understand that the preponderance of evidence is that George Lucas put absolutely zero thought into what Naboo’s culture was actually supposed to look like outside of what we see on screen, but as far as unintentionally effective worldbuilding goes, establishing that Naboo a. has a tradition of electing literal children as figurehead rulers of its planetary government, and b. apparently also has a tradition of assassinating these children with sufficient frequency that dressing up a bunch of other children as decoy targets has become standard operating procedure by the time of Padmé Amidala’s reign suggests that maybe the fact that this random backwater is a breeding ground for Sith Lords isn’t as unlikely as it initially appears.
#star wars#i've like the idea for a while that padme isn't quite as well adjusted as she seems#since it makes her marrying anakin like two days (?) after he admits to killing children in a fit of rage make more sense#and the idea that the planet she and palpatine came from also being weirder than it looks at first does sort of follow doesn't it?
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Saga Anderson, and Nordic rep in Alan Wake 2
Early on in Saga Anderson’s exploration in Alan Wake 2, she runs into Ilmo Koskela. Fiercely proud of his Finnish heritage, Ilmo gregariously makes note of Saga’s Nordic sounding name and the familiar design of her knitted sweater. Perhaps a fellow Finn?
Alas no, Saga’s mom is Swedish she informs him. Immediately Ilmo’s face falls. I’m not sure if it’s actually just the animated character defaulting to his resting face, but either way the timing is too perfect. Cue uproarious laughter from me. People in the Nordics are on friendly terms of course, but we gotta have the tiniest bit of… scornfor each other. All in good fun of course. It’s traditional.
Now, I’m Danish, not Finnish, but still, I feel right at home in the towns of Bright Falls and Watery in Alan Wake 2. All of the little nods to Nordic culture and mindset feel so wonderfully familiar to me. The melancholia, the irreverent sense of humor, the affection for the Finnish and Swedish quirks of the characters. The game feels all the stronger in tone and narrative for Remedy embracing the Finnish roots of the studio.
Which is exactly why it sucks that I almost immediately saw the charm of those narrative decisions weaponised against Saga.
I first watched the scene between Ilmo and Saga on a lets play when I was trying to figure out if I should finally dip my toes into survival horror and buy the game. Delighted by the writing I took a look into the comments to see if people were vibing as hard with it as I was. They were. But I also saw a comment that made me frown.
Paraphrasing, it basically went, come on, like hell a guy like Ilmo would make the assumption that a black woman is Finnish. There are a multitude of reasons why I think that person was wrong, mainly that Nordic people love it when we run into each other in other countries, but it also just made me sad.
Saga being black does not negate her Swedish heritage. Formally, she is American, sure (I assume, not sure how that works in the US), but she’s raised by her single Swedish mom, of course she’s going to identify heavily with that part of her herself. It’s a profound and essential part of who she is.
But hey, I’m a white potato Dane, so I’m not gonna argue that I know much about the experience of being biracial. I’m gonna stick to what I know, which is that Saga is a very moving and beautiful example of something that I’m actually not used to seeing much of - a story about connecting with your Nordic heritage and roots. And it’s part of why I love her so much.
When Nordic people show up in big, international productions, it’s usually as Vikings, and sure, it’s fun to see our wild ancestors, but contemporary questions of Nordic identity and heritage is not something I often see explored. Not even in our own productions.
So much of Saga’s story is about family. Fighting for her current one, Logan and Casey (and sure, David too, lol), and rediscovering her first one. Tor and Odin.
Her discovering her ties to Tor and Odin is profoundly moving and made me teary-eyed several times over. And sure, a lot of those ties are fantastical in nature, but they still feel very much grounded - and what makes us Nordic if not the ties to our myths and legends that Tor and Odin have made themselves the living avatars of.
While Saga’s mom, Freya, had good reasons for leaving the Anderson seer magics behind, seeing them as part of what made her family fucked up, she also cut Saga off from the fullness of her capabilities. It is only through Saga reforming her family, healing its scars and fully embracing the Anderson heritage that she becomes as powerful a parautilitarian as she is at the end of the game. That’s beautiful.
And in fact I think Saga being black only deepens the richness of those themes rather than negate them or make them irrelevant. Because yes, Saga’s story would have been moving if she was a white character too, but I am very well aware that a lot of biracial people of Nordic ancestry can feel alienated from that part of themselves. Not least because questions of who gets to claim a Nordic heritage can get pretty ugly around here. There are most definitely people who share the racist mindset of that commentator. It adds an extra dimension. Which is why seeing Tor and Odin’s eagerness to claim Saga as part of the Anderson heritage is all the more moving. Through her magics, she’s just so obviously an Anderson, and they’re so damn proud to call her theirs and fight alongside her. Because they all got that wild Viking blood in them. They’re part of her and she’s part of them.
Roger Ebert, the film critic once called movies empathy machines. I think games, when they’re at their best, can be an even more intense variation of that. Which is exactly why it baffles me that some people can play through Alan Wake 2 and still think Saga is a stunt-woke character rather than someone fully and beautifully integrated in the narrative. A narrative which, at its most basic level – in my opinion – is about the mystical bonds we form with each other and the rest of the world through art and love and blood and family and heritage. All the great horror doesn’t negate that either, it amplifies it. Kind of like that clicker.
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I am begging people to use LibreOffice and personal storage devices like hard drives or USB sticks instead of relying 100% on Google Docs. LibreOffice is free and open-source, it saves files to your own computer, and it lets you save as many different file types. You can write in it, format ebooks in it, and do everything you might possibly need to do as a writer.
"Oh, but I'll lose my USB stick--" Fine, back things up in whatever cloud you use as a form of extra protection, but you should also try your absolute damnedest to also put them on some form of storage that isn't a cloud.
I know it's not accessible to everyone, but if you at all have the ability, don't rely on shit that lives on other people's computers. Especially with everything going on with AI theft and aggressive censorship of adult media. If you don't store your files on your own personal computer that you have control over, your files aren't fully yours, and they're at the whims of whoever owns the cloud.
Learn where your files are stored and how to access them. Get into the habit of backing up your files to your own personal storage. Even if you're not up for intense tech research and you don't care about how the computer actually works, please stop letting your art live in corporate clouds.
#i've been meaning to set things up with markdown and git to have everything source controlled properly#and i should really get around to doing that#but also libreoffice is the awesome
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I need everyone to know that the ship Götheborg, the world's largest ocean-going wooden sailing ship, answered a distress call the other day.
Imagine waiting for the coast guard or whatever to show up and instead a replica of 18th century merchant ship pulls up and tows you to the coast.
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Fixed some weirdness with posting (I think) because I might be too tired to be posting things on the internet. Ah well.
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So I'm working on my comprehensive exam, and I feel like more sources of stress are alternating between two extremes.
On one hand, I keep worrying about about my choice of topic, even though my advisor approved it. Is it novel enough? Has my initial research been at all adequate to support it (or what I could get done under the time crunch of other work)? Because it doesn't really feel like it...
And on the other hand, where the hell did LaTeX put the damn image this time???
#i love having to compile my text#i mean i am a latex defender#because equations in word suck#but its still annoying
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So I'm reading (or actually listening to the audiobook of) The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin and driving like a motherfucking New Yorker as magical construct is the most fun thing I've read in a bit.
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I sit down upon the pavement in the ruined heart of the town, and I tell the dead people of Sutler’s Weald beautiful lies.
I tell them that they survived, in their hundreds - miraculously and inexplicably, dodging the bombs. Not a single victim, not one death. An act of divine mercy.
When that doesn’t work, I tell them that they were buried properly, according to whatever rites or customs they happen to cherish.
When that doesn’t work, I try and turn them into my mother again, in the hopes of making the dead people hateful to me.
When that doesn’t work, I tell them that I’m sorry. I tell them I wish they still had ears to become all the wondrous imaginings I had in store for them.
— Chapter 37: And Even The Kings In Their Bowers Of Steel.
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making this on my phone with very little sleep or consideration, but i think the point stands
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imagine being director Northmoor of the FBC and one day you revel so much in your power that you literally explode. and instead of doing anything else about it, the FBC goes “when life gives a secret paranatural government agency lemons…” and throws your possibly-alive, moving corpse in a power plant so they don’t have to worry about their power bill. then going onwards, people only refer back to you using ominous light-based puns
#remedy control#something about how this game plays with how you expect power dynamics to go in this sort of setting is fascinating to me#like northmoor's story feels like the setup of someone who was too arrogant and got what they deserved#but then you learn more about it#and aren't sure he deserved *that*
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So I was watching PBS Space Time, and the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics was originally presented in a PhD dissertation???
#hearing that while trying to work on my dissertation#i mean i never had any illusions about this being remotely significant#i'm really just impressed#and i also shouldn't be on tumblr at all but i fixed the dumb thing i did and now at least part of my code runs so#i'm looking at literally anything else for a minute
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CONTROL (2019) dev. Remedy Entertainment
#control remedy#jesse faden#god this game is pretty#something about the mocap acting in that first gif#and the framing of the elevator in the second
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Fun Fact: Togrutas are capable of echolocation
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I feel confident enough to post these now. A collection of all the existing posters after some edits from the other post that got 13k notes! These are full size/quality. Go nuts.
You may use them for wallpapers, tabletop campaigns, whatever. Consider tipping me or buying a print or sticker on ko-fi here! If you do use them, let me know what for, or send pictures!
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