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spookfished · 2 years

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ok its time for keeping up with the blorbos where i talk about my feelings towards all of the past characters that i can remember that i used to be really into (semi chronological) and YOU my dear reader get a glimpse into my psyche or another opportunity to j/k scroll

twilight sparkle: when i watched mlp i thought she was in high school but now i think shes actually in her 20s which honestly makes the show funnier. the perfect time for learning about the magic of friendship. i think its too bad that she didnt get as many opportunities to be like dorky n stuff in the later seasons like she got all character developed out.. like a distant fondness ritsu kageyama: this guy is the emotional blueprint for how i feel about alphinaud ffxiv lol. like in middle school i was like damn im just like im just like him fr but now its like aww my little scrunklydoo.. its like this wave of affection for my little fictional guy. i want to see him get self destructively embroiled in a mess beyond his control and also hes 13 years old... ruffles his hair dirk strider/hal: he is the moment. etc or i mean he was the moment several years ago. actually i was thinking about this post because yesterday bc of neils post i was like wow dirk strider and i spent 30 minutes thinking about him instead of going to sleep. anyways like yk how across act 6 his solution to like everything is to kill himself like he literally invented kill herself disease..to the point where its literally a meme but its still true. i dont think i like resonate with that as much as i did when i was originally reading it, and i have even more mixed feelings about all of the epilogues/hs2 stuff but its still like omg. one of the only times his suicide by proxy didnt work was with hal was bc hal was not just a proxy but also a Whole Nother Person and he was scared to die..arent you.. no way.. anyways i keep him in a little box terezi pyrope: i still really like her but i think the alpha kids are more easily removable from the context of hs’ plot yk theyre so self contained. terezi on the other hand is very connected to remembering what happens in hs, which i definitely dont. sotp was really good though. in some hypothetical future where i reread hs i think i would try and pay more attention to her interactions w other kids in the context of her rship with vriska instead of taking them standalone.i think i also just personally connect less with her themes n whatever but like truly nobody else has done it like her ouma: surprisingly even though i still have this guy as a pfp on another email i dont feel that much about him anymore. its like ah ndrv3 was pretty bad huh. theres other fish in the sea.. when lovepoints posts art of him its like :] though. glad to have danganronpa start to leech out of my psyche tbh it was fun while it lasted goro akechi: surprisingly i still really like this guy. i think part of it is that p5r ended up being such a serve like yeah persona 5s writing is usually bad but i think its really great that he did get to be a grumpy bitch. hmm not a lot of actual thoughts about him but a delight to have in class kim dokja: ahhhh *explode*

#txt #mutuals do this? or dont... who can say #great talk everybody time to hit the showers. im going on a walk

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saintsofvoid · 3 years

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Since people are talking about it I wanna throw my 2 cents in for hcs about the "blue eyes" conspiracy theories and draw a parallel line to another piece of cyberpunk themed media being Alita: Battle Angel.

So what do we know? Not a whole damn lot. Mr Blue Eyes, and the likes of him are characters very much shrouded in mystery. What we do know is they are part of something a lot bigger than NC. They pull the strings, they run the game, they only make themselves known if it serves their best interests. Theories of what we know is the eye glow is done when some type of cyberware is active; money transfers, call links, proxies, etc... the fact their eyes are always seemingly active like this leads us to believe there is 1 person at the helm, the rest are dolls.

How does this relate to Alita? Well if you haven't read the manga or seen the movie, I'd suggest doing so but to cut to the chase, Blue Eyes is the equivalent of Nova more so in the movie, manga is a bit more complex but there's some thing in there too. Anyways, in the movie adaptation Nova is kinda this controller over Zalem, he rules from the floating city but uses proxies to control the city below. Eyes and ears everywhere, Nova sees everything. Thing is its the same effect, when Nova takes over a body as a proxy to speak through them, their eyes glow like his, and he has complete control. Now in the manga Nova's perception of humans is colored by the Brain Bio-Chip which was created to augment the mind. Not so different than Mikoshi. Nova would carry out a number of experiments on people often brought up from the junkyard for his projects on Karma. Many of these experiments were seen as inhumane and incredibly cruel.

Nova would go from being the enemy, to an ally, to an enemy throughout the series. He was a highly skilled cyberphysician and was often known to bring people back for a second chance at life to further study them as they fought Karma. He also had expertise in nanotechnology and created a number of inventions and devices that were seen through the series.

How does this tie back into cyberpunk? Well a lot of these tropes tend to overlap in media, and the part that makes me believe this is the case and we're dealing with a Nova situation with these mysterious people is based on a few particular moments we get with Mr Blue Eyes. He's scene in the background in the Peralez's mansion, rumor he can be sometimes spotted in other high priority gigs watching V, the humming theory between killers and individuals alike, Gary's abduction and that whole ending quest, and then the ending with the Crystal Palace. This promise to save V, it doesn't read like he's using them or manipulating, its read as a guarantee- that they know something or have the ability to resources nobody else has.

A second chance at life with powers greater than one could have imagined. Better body and abilities than the one they left behind. Just have to do what they want. Just like Nova would, they can save V.

#rambles #hc post #cyberpunk 2077 #cp2077 #mr blue eyes #from the get go this is what ive believed #and i wont stop until proven otherwise

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leahazel · 3 years

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More about my morally-grey heroines and their messed-up relationships

I wanted to elaborate on this post I wrote about D&F and BFS, but it turns out that adding readmore links to reblogs is a PITA, and I just now that this is gonna turn into a fucking novelette.

So here we go.

Time to go into some detail about this!

Let’s define our terms:

“Decline and Fall” is my 120K+ series of loosely chronological, interconnected short fics, set in a tiny fandom for a visual novel that’s been in alpha development since 2015. For the record, the word count disincludes unfinished drafts, and stories that I’m holding back because they’re based on canon spoilers.

“Blood from Stone“ is my 100K unfinished Skyrim WIP, which began as a response to a kink meme prompt, and is not so much a rarepair as a non-existent one.

Both of these stories centrally feature young female protagonists and their sexual relationship with a much older man. Both heroines are... “grey” to say the least.

Let’s compare our fandoms, shall we?

Skyrim is a juggernaut fandom for a super-popular RPG which is part of a 30-yo franchise. The setting is moderately dark and casually sprinkled with murder cults, cannibalism, secret police death squads, and the prison industrial complex. The player character can be a thief and a murderer and everyone just learns to be okay with it because the only alternative is a fiery apocalypse. They also rob graves for the lulz.

Seven Kingdoms: The Princess Problem is a pinkie-toe-sized fandom for a hybrid RPG and dating sim where attractive young people flirt and date for the purpose of brokering world peace. The setting is one where you can actually broker world peace effectively. The player character can perpetrate a fair amount of proxy violence, but maintaining a good reputation dishonestly is legitimately difficult.

Now, let’s compare our heroines:

Corinne is a 24-year-old bounty hunter who became a folk hero, a soldier, and a cult assassin. She’s living alone and working for a living since she was 18. She’s never been in love, but she’s had multiple sexual and romantic relationships in the past. I deliberately wrote her as being very sexually confident and self-assured. She also has combat training, magical training, her special Dragonborn powers, and an incalculable amount of social clout. By every metric, she’s a powerful character. Though she can talk her way out of a tight spot (all my favorite characters can), she can also fight her way out.

Verity is (at the beginning of D&F) not yet 18 years old. She’s a princess from a very conservative kingdom who was raised to become a barter bride in a diplomatic marriage. The values that were passed to her were duty, tradition, and absolute obedience. Her primary skills are social, charisma, eloquence, and persuasion. Then she was dropped into the deep water of a diplomatic summit and had the weight of future history put on her shoulders, without ever having been taught how to make her own decisions or live with her regret.

To sum up, we have one hyper-competent, confident, and independent badass, universally recognized as powerful and dangerous, and then we have someone who’s basically a deconstruction of a traditional fantasy princess.

Okay, what about the more specific setting within the game world?

BFS is set in Markarth, arguably the most corrupt city in Skyrim, and the site of a localized war, on top of the 2-3 other wars that Skyrim has going on. The city is controlled by the cartel-like Silver-Blood family, and their enemies are swiftly and brutally eliminated. The rule of law is a joke. When the player character arrives at Markarth, they witness a chain or murders and are drawn into a conspiracy that sees them sentenced to life in prison for a crime they didn’t commit. The ruling elite suppress the native underclass by a variety of inventive methods. The roads into the city are controlled by the remnants of a violent but failed uprising, and this uprising is actually the origin story of Skyrim’s entire civil war storyline.

D&F is set in Revaire, explicitly the most violently war-torn of the seven kingdoms. Once the epicenter of a conquering empire, it was a country full of arts and culture, until a bloody coup slaughtered the entire royal line and instituted a new and more brutal regime. The new regime is on shaky grounds and foresighted people predict its imminent fall to rebel forces. So much, so canon. In D&F, I made a point of developing the new royals and their small coterie of supporters, as well as illustrating their constant struggle to conceal how widely reviled they are by the populace, and most of the former nobility. Their apathy to the plight of the common people is underscored in contrast to Verity’s compassion, which is ridiculed as a sentimental feminine affectation.

I’m attracted to certain themes, as you might have noticed.

Now, we get to talk about love interests.

Thongvor Silver-Blood is rather anemically characterized in Skyrim’s canon, so much of the information that I include in BFS is inferred. From his limited number of dialogues in the game, we know that he’s politically ambitious, a Stormcloak supporter, easily angered, and that he has one legitimate friend in the city. Like most Skyrim characters of his age bracket, he served in the Great War. He’s defined by his relationship to his generational cohort. In BFS, he’s def8ined in contrast to his brother. Thonar is comfortable being thought of as a villain. Thongvor still needs to believe that he’s the good guy. And I’m gonna get more into that in later chapters, too.

As a love interest, he’s initially in awe of Corinne, and always genuinely adoring, but more than a little jealous and possessive. BFS is not a story about love redeeming bad men (don’t get me started), but Thongvor shows different sides of his personality to different people, and the side that Corinne gets to see is much nicer than what most people do.

Hyperion Asper is a character of my own devising, whose existence in 7KPP canon is purely implied. We know his children, Jarrod and Gisette, and we knew that he organized a coup to seize the throne. I posit him as a tyrant and unrepentant child-killer (not directly stated in D&F, at least not yet). He’s ruthless and manipulative and his sole purpose is maintaining a sense of personal power. I structured him as the bad example that Jarrod tries -- and fails -- to live up to.

As a love interest... look, he’s a man who’s cheating on his wife with his son’s wife. He seduces Verity and manipulates her, and takes a special delight in pushing her buttons. All his compliments to her are mean-spirited and back-handed. He’s also jealous and possessive... which is especially pathetic, since he’s jealous of his own son, whom Verity doesn’t even like. His rage is a constant implied undercurrent in the narrative.

And the relationship dynamics themselves?

Corinne kisses Thongvor, proposes marriage to him, and then sleeps with him before riding off into mortal danger. She’s fond and affectionate, but she shies away from intense emotions, whether negative or positive. Since they spend most of their time apart, their marriage has been defined by Thongvor yearning like a sailor’s wife, while Corinne ran around doing violence and crime. They only just had their first fight. It will change when they get to spend some more significant time together... but on the whole, their marriage is fairly happy, and the emotional dynamic favors Corinne -- so far. It’s not a pure gender reversal, but that element is definitely dominant.

Hyperion starts seducing Verity on their very first meeting, and relies on a combination of magnetic attraction and Verity’s inexperience in life to keep her coming back, against her better judgment. Their relationship is mutually defined by a combination of attraction and resentment of that attraction. The danger of the situation is an essential element, to the point where it’s hard to imagine their affair would survive without it. It’s a puzzle and a battle, a source of fascination but not of comfort. There’s lust involved, and curiosity, but not a shred of love or even like. The closest thing to genuine affection is when Verity briefly imagines that there could be a version of Hyperion she actually liked, cobbled from his various, hidden good qualities. Any trappings of a genuine relationship are deliberately discordant.

I have tried, more than once, to imagine an alternate universe in which these two could be happy. It can’t be done. they are a study in dysfunction.

So where’s the similarity, with all these differences outlined?

Corinne’s choice to marry into the Silver-Blood family makes her complicit in their rule of the Reach, corrupt and reactionary as it is. Her reluctance to accept being called by their name reflects a reluctance to confront unpleasant truths that’s fundamental to her character. Choosing to be one of them affects and will continue to affect how other people see her, mostly negatively, and mostly without her being aware of it. Being Thongvor’s wife has gained her enemies. The fact that she doesn’t share his more reactionary views is something that they’ve both chosen to elegantly ignore, but the rest of the world won’t be so generous.

Verity’s choice to marry into the Revaire royal family makes her complicit in their violence against the forces rebelling against them, albeit in a more subtle way. Her personal dislike of Jarrod and the fact that their marriage was purely political will not absolve her in anyone’s eyes. Neither will her compassionate and charitable character, which can only be seen as a fig leaf to the Revaire royals’ general brutality. She has lost at least one good friend -- who will never see her the same way, since she chose to throw her lot in with his enemies. She will go down in history as an Asper wife -- but if she’s lucky, not just as that.

Both Corinne and Verity choose to accept some of the violence of the system that they live under, in order to serve their own lofty, long-term goals. Both of them are more image-driven than they care to admit, and though they are genuinely caring and compassionate, they will readily sacrifice compassion in service on their goals. They are queens (or queen-like figures), one-degree-of-separation members of the ruling class, implicated but not directly in control.

And their relationships serve to highlight what they are willing to accept, even though it goes against their conscience.

Is there a conclusion to be drawn here?

Sort of. I want to write about power, compromise and complicity. For whatever reason, it turns out that yw/om relationships are... a really good vehicle for exploring that. I can’t really explain why that is, just yet. I just... have had these thoughts floating, unstructured, in my head for months on end. I needed to get them out on paper, and give them some semblance of order.

I don’t even know why anyone but me would read this, as long and meandering as it is. But having it accessible might be of use to me.

#blood from stone #decline and fall #train wreck verity #i don't know why anyone would read this #it's nearly 2k words #and it has no real conclusion #hazel's d&f/bfs meta spiel

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softlass27 · 4 years

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Okay okay you don't have to do this now, but i was also wondering about your Eve fic: I've always been a daughter, because MY GOD I LOVED IT SO MUCH. Like your entire thought process behind Eve's character, how her relationship with Paddy and Chas came to be, just kdlsf everything. Sorry okay xx luv you!

So this is probably the most random, spontaneous thing I’ve ever written. It was borne out of two Chaddy-related irritations.

The first was them having another baby barely one year after the traumatic loss of the first one. It was so strange to me that everyone reacted so happily when they announced Chas was pregnant again, literally months after being devastated by Grace. It seemed way too soon, like Eve was essentially just there to replace what they’d lost and help them move on from it. And their obsessive paranoia over making sure Eve was okay all the time drove me mad, and just made me think it was bound to mess her up. To quote my mother, “The kid doesn’t stand a chance with those two.”

The second irritation was the way Chas kept trying to push Aaron to engage and spend time with Eve just after he’d lost Robert and Seb – and the chance of having another child of his own. It was so insensitive and cruel of her to use Eve to guilt Aaron into moving on by saying that she “needs her big brother”. She (plus Paddy and Liv) didn’t give a shit that Aaron had lost Robert, didn’t let him mourn everything he’d lost, they just wanted him to bounce back and forget all about him.

Somewhere along the line I started thinking, wouldn’t it be great if Chaddy’s constant pushing backfired and Eve became the biggest Robert stan of them all?

So that’s basically where it came from – anti-Chaddy spite.

Eve’s character

Oh God, I was SO nervous about writing her. I had a really clear picture of her in my head – that she’d be pretty well-behaved kid, very girly, quietly confident, and generally quite a chilled-out kid. But getting all that across in a way that made her likeable stressed me out so much, I was terrified that people either wouldn’t like her or just wouldn’t care about her.

It’s also the only fic I’ve written where the focus isn’t on Robron (although ofc there’s LOTS of them in there), so I was concerned people would be annoyed by that.

Relationship with Chaddy

Ahaha where to begin?

So obviously Eve’s relationship with her parents was a big part of the story. I wanted to make it clear that their trauma from losing Grace was never dealt with because they had Eve so quickly, and unfortunately that means Eve is the one to suffer because of it. Their grief becomes unhealthy, and it causes flaws that they already had – control issues, overbearing natures, a belief that they’re always in the right – to spiral out of control into something more extreme and sinister.

In the first half of the story, when Eve’s still a kid, their controlling and overprotective behaviour is something that she’s aware of but accepts easily enough, because she doesn’t know any different. Then when she becomes a teenager, there’s a shift in how it manifests. Once she starts to understand that something’s wrong and pull away, this is when the real breakdown of their relationship happens. They basically go between two extremes – either smothering her completely by inventing illnesses/stop her from becoming independent, or pushing her away and giving her the cold shoulder whenever she tries to resist said smothering.

There’s a form of mental illness/abuse that I find absolutely fascinating, which is called Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy (NHS link here). Not that much is known about it, but it basically involves an abuser (usually a parent or caregiver) faking illnesses in their child. It can be for a variety of reasons – power, attention, control, financial gain. I wasn’t comfortable actually labelling Chaddy’s treatment of Eve as this specific form of abuse, since I’m not a mental health professional (not yet anyway, I’m training to become one!), but it’s definitely something I had in the back of my mind when I was writing this. I doubt it’s a story the show would ever do, since it would mean turning Chaddy into actual villains, but I think the potential is definitely there with Eve!

I suppose the other thing to mention is Grace. Oh, Eve’s feelings about her sister are so complicated, probably more complicated than I was able to convey, though I loved giving it a good go. When she’s still a child, Eve’s main feeling in regards to Grace is confusion. Confusion over what happened to her, why she makes her parents so sad, why her not being here means Eve doesn’t get to do normal things like other kids.

Then when she gets older and understands, her feelings get a lot more messy. There’s anger, sadness, resentment... and a strange sort of disconnect between what her parents tell her to feel and what she actually feels. Not to mention the cold reality she tries not to dwell on too much – the only reason she was born is because Grace had died.

Relationship with Aaron

Obviously I wanted Eve to be close to Aaron, and for him to sort of be her lifeline, her only real shot at growing up “normally”. Chaddy foisting her on him so much as a child means he sort of naturally becomes a third parent as well as a big brother. He’s the one who provides the things that a good parent is supposed to – support, encouragement, pushing her to be the best/as happy as she can be.

So yeah, Chaddy’s plan to use Eve to make Aaron act in the way they wanted backfires MASSIVELY. She becomes the only one who helps him get through losing Robert, and who (admittedly unknowingly) helps them get back together. And in turn, Eve spending so much time with Aaron makes her grow up strong and resilient – just like he is – and Chaddy can’t stand that. Ah, sweet irony.

Another thing I like about Eve and Aaron is that – on the surface – they have nothing in common. Unlike Liv, who was basically brought in as a “mini female Aaron”, Eve is very much her own person and very different to her big brother. But there are a few subtle similarities in their personalities that I did try to show – they’re both quite blunt when they want to be, they’re both quite easily-pleased and find simple pleasure in things, and neither of them suffer fools for long. And they both adore Robert. Speaking of whom…

Relationship with Robert

Literally one of the first thoughts I had about this story was: Eve will fall in love with Robert instantly. What little girl wouldn’t? The sweet relationship between them was one of my favourite things to write, their conversations always seemed to flow so naturally. It was also a soothing balm to my irritation over Liv hating Robert for literally no reason (other than she wanted Aaron all to herself). It never made any sense to me, so I wanted Eve to be the exact opposite. Writing Chaddy’s reaction to this was also very fun lol.

One thing that’s really lovely about them is how Robert becomes the only person who really understands what it’s like to not get along with your parents (and to be constantly compared to another sibling). To feel suffocated/desperate to get away, yet also upset when they reject you and guilty because you aren’t falling into line with their plans for you. Of course Aaron understands to an extent, because he obviously knows what Chas and Paddy can be like, but it wasn’t something he personally grew up with.

Ballet

So Eve’s dance career wasn’t planned, not at all. It was initially just a hobby I used to show that she’s a proper girly girl. It wasn’t until I reached her teenage years that I realised I needed some sort of big conflict to cause the final showdown. I knew whatever it was had to lead to her moving into the Mill, before leaving the village and getting away from Chaddy for good.

I know from personal experience that if you grow up in the north and decide you want to pursue a career in the arts, you’re probably going to have to leave home and move to where the opportunities are. So the idea came to me that turning Eve’s passion for ballet into a career choice would mean she HAD to leave home, and it would serve as the ideal catalyst for this final fight.

I do have a head canon in my head about how Eve’s twenties and her early dance career will go. Who knows if I’ll ever write it, though!

#thanks amy!#god this is so rambly #i hope it makes sense??#eve dingle #my writing #anti-chaddy #robron #robandaaronsoulmates

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oumakokichi · 7 years

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Any idea why Ouma hates robots so much? Besides just having fun at Kiibo's expense, he goes so far as to say he hates all robots and wish they'd all just disappear or get destroyed. Hating the monokumarz is one thing, but why did he apply it to all machines? Thanks!

I think there are a few reasons for it. The first one, likeyou said, is mostly for comedic purposes. He often makes a lot of thesecomments about robots or machines for the sake of really exaggerated comedy,particularly in order to push Kiibo’s buttons or earn a snippy (tsukkomi)comeback in response. But I think part of it is also just directed at the factthat the robots and machinery in the killing game are the main things keepingthem there.

To touch on the first point, I think many of Ouma’s commentsaren’t actually made in any real harm. Clearly if he actually hated robots ormachines or thought that someone like Kiibo “wasn’t a person,” he had plenty ofopportunities to either eliminate him or incapacitate him. We discover inChapter 5 that Ouma had far more tools than he let on, including the items he’dcommissioned Miu to make for him.

Many of these items could easily have put Kiibo out ofcommission for a while—even just standing in the area where the electric bombwent off after they opened the machinery bay in Chapter 5 was enough to makeKiibo feel like he was having the equivalent of a human allergic reaction. Theelectric hammers were designed “not to work on people,” so Kiibo was curious asto whether it would harm him or not, since it would all depend on whether Miusaw him as a person or as a machine when she was building it. Clearly, Ouma hada lot of options on-hand if he saw Kiibo as a real threat and if he had wantedto remove him from the game or honestly thought that he was somehow “less thana person.”

However, all Ouma knew was that Kiibo was simply… unnatural.He quite literally writes the character for “strange” next to his picture onhis whiteboard. His backstory doesn’t add up or explain why a robot would needto be there in the first place, and the more “memories” they uncover from theremember lights, the weirder it seems for a robot to be there at all,particularly as they were supposed to be selected for the Gopher Plan due to theirimmunity from the virus mentioned in Chapter 5. Ouma most likely piecedtogether that if their entire group’s purpose was really to land on a remote planet and repopulate it as the “Adamsand Eves of the new world,” then it made absolutely no sense at all for Kiiboto be with them.

I think he suspected that because Kiibo was a robot, he hadties to the outside world and to the killing game itself—a theory which wasultimately proven correct in the end, as Kiibo was essentially an audienceproxy. Since Ouma knew that they were being watched by an audience very earlyon (alluding to it even as early as Chapters 2 and 3), he probably did wonderif Kiibo was meant to serve that kind of role, which meant that Kiibo’spresence was highly suspicious and that he wasn’t someone Ouma could easilytrust, right off the bat.

But it’s also a fact that Kiibo’s role as an audience proxywasn’t something he did willingly, nor was he even aware of it until Chapter 6.He displays time and time again that he doesn’t have bad intentions and that he’san all-around fair and objective individual who simply wants to be thought ofas an ordinary high schooler like the rest of his classmates—something which Iwouldn’t doubt frustrated Ouma, since it would’ve probably been easier to planaround Kiibo if he had actually been an emotionless machine with no autonomy orfree will. But since he wasn’t, Ouma was aware that he was a “person,” even ifhe wasn’t a human being.

Many of Ouma’s most drastic “destroy all robots” comments ordigs at how “humans can’t just read memories off a hard disk” are oftenimmediately met with Kiibo’s own comebacks, whether it’s about suing Ouma forhis discrimination, or about how humans are really the ones who should bepitied for their irrationality. Kiibo is hardly one to just sit back and takeOuma’s bratty behavior; he’s very capable of standing up for himself, and it’spretty telling, I think, that Ouma often seems to expect these comebacks andusually just grins, rather than trying to make it into a serious argument.

I’ve always been a little baffled at how people seem to takemany of these comments of Ouma’s 100% seriously when they read like a manzaicomedy routine. Ouma says something obviously bratty and exaggerated and playsboke with his robo-discrimination comments, Kiibo gets angry and retaliateswith a tsukkomi, repeat. Kiibo’s line about “being good at comedy routines” inChapter 3 amused me quite a bit, since it’s actually pretty much what he andOuma do most of the time in their interactions. Angie even remarks early inChapter 2 during one of their back-and-forth sessions that they “seem like they’rereally getting along.” So I don’t think those comments are meant to be read asOuma genuinely being hostile or downright mean.

I do think it’s him at his brattiest, though. Ouma isn’tsomeone who likes to harm others or see them get hurt or killed, but it’sabsolutely true he loves pranking the shit out of them—too much, sometimes. Hecan be exasperating and annoying, and it shows whenever he starts behavingsuper childishly. The worst he’s ever really done to Kiibo is probably hittinghim in the VR world to be annoying, and even that was partially to showcase thefact that Kiibo could feel pain in the VR world the same way as anyone else,unlike in the real world (a fact that Kiibo himself was actually quite happyabout, once he got over his initial annoyance).

As for the second point I made, I think Ouma’s resentmenttowards the Monokumerz and other machines is more directed at the fact that themachines themselves are some of the biggest obstacles in keeping them all fromleaving the killing game. The Exisals are, after all, quite literally killingmachines used to enforce the rules. Having rules is one thing, but withoutsomething present to enforce them, the whole game would fall apart. The Exisalsprovide the perfect means to intimidate and force the characters intocontinuing the killing game, preventing them from stepping out of line in thesame way that the Monobeasts did in sdr2.

The Monokumerz and Monokuma are the direct link between thekilling game and the ringleader, with the Monokumerz capable of controlling theExisals while Monokuma (and the Mother Monokuma, specifically) were able tomonitor the surveillance footage and keep an eye on everyone throughout the school.The sophistication of their technology was exactly what made it so difficult togo against them—not even to touch on the fact that they kept providing thecharacters with new motives for murder the day after each trial, in order tokeep the game going.

It’s quite understandable then that Ouma wouldn’t enjoy theMonokumerz, Monokuma, the Exisals, or any of the machinery and technology thatwent into organizing and maintaining the killing game. On his whiteboard, heeven writes “annoying” next to the pictures of the Monokumerz: not only are allthe bears involved in ensuring that the killing game continues, but they alsotalk and act according to such an obvious script for the sake of “entertainment.”

I really doubt that Ouma meant any of his “all machinesshould get destroyed” comments seriously, but even if you do look at it from aserious perspective, it makes sense to some degree, considering the machineryfor the killing game itself was so incredibly advanced and difficult tocircumvent. Not only Monokuma and the Monokumerz, but the Exisals, the hiddencameras, the electric barriers, and even the dome itself were all far toodifficult for a bunch of high schoolers to fight back against normally, whichis exactly why Ouma wound up commissioning Miu to make inventions for him andthe others, as her talent was one of the only ones that could actually stand achance against the ringleader’s own technology.

Anyway, this is just my take on it! It’s possible otherpeople might read differently into his comments about robots and machines, butI’ve always taken most of his comments towards Kiibo specifically to be fairlybratty but harmless, while his comments towards the Monokumerz and Monokumausually come across as much more exasperated or bored. I hope this helps answeryour question, anon!

#ndrv3 #drv3 #new danganronpa v3 #kokichi ouma #ouma kokichi #ndrv3 spoilers //#my meta #okay to reblog #anonymous

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writernotwaiting · 7 years

Text

Mis-Matched

Right, so I know I haven’t posted anything on my over-sized WIP since April, but here I am starting another fic that I have absolutely no business getting into. At least this one should be shorter than the other (famous last words). Sorry.

Title: Mis-Matched Rating: M (this is subject to change at the whim of the author’s muses) Characters: Loki, Sigyn, Frigga, Theoric, and various supporting OCs Description: This is an attempt to fill the propmt requested by @someillplanetreigns (and now I can’t even tag you!): “you asked for prompts and pairings - I would like to humbly beg for more Logyn? I don’t have a great prompt, but this odd thought is in my head about a way to make the comic plot about Theoric and the marriage into something about marriage by proxy? Maybe something like Loki has the duty of proxy-marrying Sigyn cos Theoric’s in the army, and totally plays everyone by going the whole hog and appearing as Theoric, but then Sigyn, who thought Theoric was dull as ditchwater and Loki is… well, y’know, Loki.” I’m not sure this is precisely what you wanted, so I apologize in advance for my wayward muses – Loki does what he wants. Chapter: 1 of 2? Acknowledgements: thank you @icybluepenguin for serving as one of my favorite institgaors and sounding boards – you rock!

______________________________________

Mis-Matched, Part 1

Herr Braggison loomed over Sigyn as she slunk down lower into the chair, nose buried deep in her book, brown hands clutching the pages tighter as he moved closer.

“Sigyn — I just received a letter from the All-mother.”

“Mmmhmm.”

“Apparently, the fighting at the front has become entrenched.”

“MmMMMmm.”

“Sigyn!”

“Hmmm?”

“Put the book down and look at me when I speak to you.”

Sigyn abruptly dropped the large hardback with a whack onto the desk, folding her hands demurely as she smiled up angelically at her guardian.

A dark scowl passed over his face before he began again, “I have just received a letter from the All-mother that tells me the fighting has become entrenched at the front. As such, Theoric will not be granted leave to attend your upcoming nuptials.”

“Oh really?” Suddenly Sigyn was all attention, back straight, eyes bright.

Herr Braggison’s scowl deepened. “As you know, there is a limited time during which you must be married, or the contract must be annulled or re-negotiated.” Sigyn nodded and a little smile began to blossom across her face.

“As a result, we will have to fulfill the contract by proxy.”

“WHAT?”

Her guardian flinched, then frowned once more. “Yes. There is a legal provision that allows for marriage by proxy. Thankfully, the All-mother has offered to send a representative from the court who can serve as a stand-in for your intended spouse, after which you will go to court with him to serve the queen until Theoric can return from the hostilities. In this way, the contract will be fulfilled. No fuss. Everything perfectly legal. No re-negotiations necessary. Neither will we be forced to seek out another candidate. You see? Everything is taken care of. In another month, I will have completed my legal obligations as your guardian by providing you with an appropriate husband of suitable political standing, and you will no longer have to endure my presence.”

Sigyn rose out of her chair. “Wait just a minute …”

“No. no. no. You and I have both been anxious to get rid of each other for years, and now here’s your chance. Theoric is a highly-respected officer is His Majesty’s army with excellent political connections. It’s a marriage much better than anything you could have hoped to get had your own family been in charge of the negotiations. I will not put this alliance at risk just because your intended can’t keep a schedule.”

Herr Braggison paused at this point long enough to line up Sigyn’s book precisely with the edge of the table. “You will be married by the end of this month, and go off to live under the protection of the All-mother until your husband gets back from the war. Either way, you will be out of my house! You. Your books. Your seider. Your temper. Your … disorder … your …” And here he looked her up and down waving his hands around in the air before spitting out, “everything! The delegation from court will arrive one week prior to the ceremony. End. Of. Discussion.”

And even as Sigyn drew breath for a reply, he turned on his heel and stormed out of the library, leaving her fuming.

“Ohhhhaaaaahhhhrrrgh! My ‘everything,’ is it? My evil alien outlander contamination, you mean! Go fuck a goat, Iric! I never signed that cursed contract! You think you’re so clever, getting everything lined up a month before my majority so it wasn’t necessary!”

Sigyn flung the chair backwards before she began pacing about the room. “A month! A month and then I’ll be privileged to sit around with the All-mother’s handmaidens doing needlework until my eyes cross and listening to a bunch of insect-brained idiots gossip about big, blond musclebound, testosterone-poisoned bachelors who have rocks for brains. And then, whenever my husband returns triumphant from the battlefield, I will be expected to take up housekeeping like a meek little domestic pet and cater to the whims of my own personal rock-headed Einherjahr! Oh, look at my lovely brown-skinned alien — isn’t she exotic? If I weren’t ready to burn this house down and be rid of you, Iric, I would set fire to those contracts myself! What happened to the spinster option? Why could there not be a clause in the papers for that? Why marriage? And why him? Dearest Norns, he is so boring! And stupid! And … Aesir!”

But the dictates of her father’s will were explicit, Sigyn was the legal ward of her guardian until she was suitably married. Period. There was no spinster clause. No femme sole provision. Only marriage.

When the delegation arrived, she was supposed to be there. “Supposed to,” being the operant phrase. She was not. She was not there to greet them in the grand hall as they entered. She was not there for the state dinner that evening. She did not show for the formal brunch the following morning. Instead, Sigyn went out to an old, disused greenhouse and started target practice, pointing at tiny widows in succession and creating a lovely pattern by throwing runes at individual panes and shattering them. Sigyn filled her lungs with the ozone after-burn of her seider as she went.

K-pish! “That’s for my mother for getting herself knocked off by that stupid wizard!”

K-pish! “That’s for my father for drawing up that ridiculous contract!”

K-pish! “That’s for Herr Braggison for being such a money-grubbing accountant of a negotiator!” She inhaled deeply.

K-pish! “That’s for the All-mother who refuses to nullify that stupid-ass contr-“

“Good morning, Lady Sigyn!”

“Ahhh!” Sigyn jumped a good six inches off the ground and fired off flash of blue seider that was just barely deflected by a green shield thrown up by her visitor.

“Goat’s piss—I’m so sorry!” And then just as quickly she covered her mouth when she realized who he was. “Hel! I mean, Sorry! Shit.” She slapped her forehead. “Oh, your majesty, I so very sorry, are you hurt? You startled me … I mean, I had no idea you were part of the delegation. I didn’t … I’m so very sorry. Are you hurt? Oh Norns, this is terrible.”

Sigyn hastily bent into a deep curtsy and lowered her head. “I’m so sorry!”

She maintained her obeisance for several long moments and grimaced as she thought she heard him make some vague noise of disapproval, but then the noise shifted a bit, and she suddenly realized he was laughing.

She scowled and jerked up her head. “Are you laughing at me?”

He was laughing. It started as an almost silent chuckle as he tried to suppress it, his shoulders shaking ever more violently until he was full-on laughing, smile wide across face. Her scowl deepened for a moment, but then she couldn’t help but smile back, and before long she broke into giggles of her own.

A full minute passed like this before the prince closed the distance between them and reached out to help her off her knees with one hand and wipe his eyes with the other.

“Oh, by all that’s blessed, you should have seen the look on your face! I should have loved to capture that image forever!”

“Your majesty, I really am so sorry. No one has ever followed me out here. I never expected someone to show up, least of all you, and I was, well, preoccupied.”

He looked up at her handiwork. “I can see that. Quite an inventive way to work out your frustrations.”

Sigyn blushed deeply when she remembered what she had said. “Ohhhh! You heard that, didn’t you? Please don’t say anything. I’m already on the verge of … well, I guess I don’t know what Herr Braggison would do to me at this point — permanent confinement until the contract is signed, I suppose, so I don’t embarrass him any farther? And the queen … I know it’s not her fault. A contract is a contract and can’t be unwritten. I’m just. No. I didn’t mean it. It’s fine. Really. It’s all good.” And she folded her hands and smiled a beauty pageant smile that looked very nearly convincing.

Loki nodded slowly. “Well, I won’t mention it, if you like.”

She let out a breath she’d been holding. “That’s very gracious of you, your majesty.” She dipped a tiny curtsey once more and her smile softened into something more natural.

In response, he flashed her a smile that could easily have turned her into a pile of goo had it not been for the words that followed. “Please, call me Loki, after all, we are going to get married next week.”

“Oh yeah, “married”. Ha ha.” Her smile abruptly turned brittle and she sobered considerably, reminding herself, Not flirting. Off the market. Big tag marked SOLD! And Loki backed off with raised hands.

“Sorry.” He raised an eyebrow. “I gather you aren’t thrilled at the prospect?”

The beauty pageant smile returned. “Oh no, it’s a great privilege. Theoric is an excellent match. My guardian has worked very hard to ensure an advantageous contract, and I’m grateful that you’ve agreed to serve as a proxy to ensure the terms are fulfilled.”

A smirk spread over Loki’s face. “Did you memorize that speech?”

Her eyes looked slightly ill at that that, but the smile didn’t waiver and she didn’t answer. Loki inhaled and he backed off once more, pursing his lips as he concluded, “Right. An excellent match.”

An uncomfortable pause followed until Loki finally started up a new topic, “I was unaware, Lady Sigyn, that you practiced seider. Have you studied long?”

“Oh! Well! It’s mostly self-taught. Mother had just started my lessons when she passed away, so I’ve had to rely on the books she left in the library. That’s the one argument I won when father’s estate was cleared out—I managed to keep control of nearly her entire library. I’m afraid I’ll never be a master of the craft like she was, but I’ve managed pretty well, for all that.”

“You have her books? I wonder if you would let me take a look while I’m here.”

“I would be honored Prince Loki.”

“Loki. Just Loki.” And he extended his elbow to escort her back to the house.

She hesitated a second before resting her hand in the crook of his elbow. “Thank you, m’lord. Just Loki, then.”

*******************

Later that night, Loki stood in his room and reached out to draw a set of runes on the mirror, eyes moving deliberately as they followed the green shimmer as it creeped in from the edges of the frame, turned slowly to gold, and then cleared to reveal the face of Frigga, All-mother.

Loki inclined his head, “Good evening, Mother. It is good to see you.”

Frigga offered a wry smile as she replied, “Good evening to you, as well, Loki. How has your ambassadorship fared today? Did you finally manage to greet Theoric’s intended?”

“I did, indeed.” Loki returned her smile. “I found her out in an old greenhouse knocking out window panes with her seider.”

“Really?”

“I barely missed getting winged myself when I startled her.” He snickered. “Why did you not warn me of the danger I would face?”

“I had no idea she practiced seider. She was so young when her mother passed, I assumed that she never trained.”

“Apparently she is self taught. Is that even possible?”

“Not unheard of, I suppose, but certainly rare. How did you find her — will the marriage suit, do you think?”

“Do you wish my honest answer, Mother, or a diplomatic one?”

“Loki,” she chided.

Loki’s face soured. “Frankly, I can’t imagine a more poorly made match. She is bright, well-read, quick-witted, and blunt, whereas Theoric is, well—none of those things. They will make each other perfectly miserable. I can’t imagine why he would seek out such a match, unless she’s …”

Loki read the warning on his mother’s face immediately, “ahhhh, of course, unless she’s rich.” He paused. “She is, isn’t she? He’s to get a big, fat dowry.”

“Shush, Loki. Everything has already been arranged. If the couple are pleased enough with the match to sign the contract, there is nothing to be done against it.”

“I’m not entirely sure she is. What does she get out of this arrangement?”

“Out of her guardian’s house, I suppose. He has certainly made no secret of the fact that she has been a difficult charge. I believe she is anxious to cut those ties as soon as she can.”

“By marrying Theoric?” He asked dubiously.

“As near as I can remember, the terms of the wardship dictate that she cannot leave her guardian’s care until she marries. It’s an old fashioned arrangement, but it cannot be altered.”

“But … Theoric?”

“Loki—it is not your place to approve or disapprove of the match. You are there only to ensure the contract is fulfilled before the terms are up. There must be mitigating circumstances that lead her guardian to believe that another match might be difficult to attain, or perhaps difficult to attain with such advantageous conditions. Marriage negotiations can be complicated, especially for orphans like Sigyn.”

“Like Sigyn.”

“Yes, like Sigyn.”

“You mean outlanders.”

“Yes. People prefer …” And here Frigga had the decency to hesitate and even blush a bit.

“Their own kind.”

“Well, yes. It’s tricky.”

“Right.” His face had drawn into a deep scowl by that point, but knew she was right. Aesir are insular and slow to accept anything, or anyone, different. But Theoric! That imbecile. She’s wasted on him.

#fan fiction #Loki #Sigyn #logyn #Marvel #MCU #Norse mythos #sort of #arranged marriage #Sigyn has anger issues #snark #because it's Loki #swears #because it's Sigyn

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wallkickswillwork · 7 years

Text

signal jamming

incoherency is comforting because of the narrative weve been fed our whole entire lives that in order to be palatable media must in some way be complete and have beveled, well-defined edges rather than being a mess of finger paints, bright colors, strange dialogues and verbiage, build trees of moods.

thoughts on: -futuristic anime, 90s anime and the unique sense of mood in toonami shows. they are a very good series of shows for people who are coming of age and who must slowly be forced to reckon with the industrialization and mercenary nature of adult life, as it is increasingly held captive by capitalism. there is also something essentially spiritual about it, especially shows like precure and dbz, where an interior or exterior-made-interior force is responsible for the protagonists' success in the face of an oppressive world-system. under capitalism, it frequently is the case that the entire world or entirety-of-world is against us. heroes must overcome overwhelming odds to leave their mark on a gauntlet of greats. -cowboy bebop, final fantasy 7, metroid as meditations on loss, urbanization, dating back to blade runner. this is a type of meditation that is present in much of cyberpunk, but its also not exclusively cyberpunk, and can extend in nature to non-cyberpunk works.

thinking about necrobarista and how its attempting to "resuscitate" anime, while this approach doesnt really examine what contemporary anime like jojos, precure, and slightly more dated anime like hidaske and nichijou do well. if we get all this tunnel vision for gurren lagann and flcl we can never look forward. i think a lot of the visual work that needs to be done is probably in movies. i think maybe there could be work done to marry cinema proper with its animated counterpart. steven universe seems like it gets it, and there are some anime that really seemed like they got it. i dont think were beyond salvation.

-listening to the whos "tommy" and thinking about how trauma and the humanity of that trauma is experienced and lived-through by the main character in socratic fashion. these stories are discussed by people whose actual, authentic experience of trauma irl is doubtful at best. they are great successes on stage who dont struggle in the sense that an actual victim would struggle. calls to mind how a lot of freuds patients would fabricate csa in order to fulfill the expectations of the therapist. but in other cases, actual patients with csa would repress their experiences or not feel comfortable discussing. so thats how i feel about gurus like meher baba or i guess alan watts. less trustworthy and more like scam artists. i do believe in what they teach, however. i think that a guru can teach the truth even if that guru is a liar. maybe its the truth, but the guru doesnt know it to be true, or else, the way the guru teaches it is untrue.

-for a while i imagined my own autism to be the result of childhood trauma that was repressed, but later emerged that those memories were fabricated, to my knowledge, and was left wondering.

-learning to regard the world with a sense of wonder from media like cowboy bebop and ff7. these worlds are jaded and decaying realities but there is a sense of awe at the vast, uncompromising reality. truly vast, sprawling and yawning cities and vast starry skies up above. beholding these things and beholding the starry skies and huge cities of our own planet surely stirs something in me.

-fantasy anime tends to go the joke route like slayers or else the route of "we are all kids, bro, stuck in an mmo" and i think this is mostly due to the admittedly antiquated setting of high fantasy in european trochets and history which to japanese people probably feel like white person set dressing and as they should, i mean. there are more high fantasy themes in something like inuyasha and japans history can be feudal, edo, the meiji restoration, primordial like princess mononoke, etc, so theres more wiggle room for historical works there. slayers et al is usually reduced to "characters moving around the forest" which is almost like this grand slice of the collective anime consciousness as it stands overlapping with, say, pokemon, to the extent where its one of the cliche anime things everyone thinks about, alongside high school, robots, nurses, etc.

-another thing to which we could probably ascribe the success of something like slayers to is wizardry and by proxy dragon quest. small graph paper monster garden games. the appeal is entirely mathematical so there are only a few directions that anime directors tend to run with it (goofy gag comedy if youre making a show or cut and dried authentic dungeon crawlers with moe characters instead of the usual dbz ones). going off what you definitely learn in japanese history class if youre a japanese student, for starters, there are thousands of years of chinese history, so you have romance of 3 kingdoms type stuff. or you have high school romances accounting for the various fire emblems where the appeal becomes game of thronesy "which of my characters in dragon quest land can i make kiss each other and myself", very good ground to cover as we start asking the important questions. theres samurai stuff as we already know, drawing on years of samurai media, kurosawas films and zen spirituality, art of the blade type stuff, jeet kune do in some instances and reaching so far afield as to probably raise some interesting and important questions about pan-asiatic cultural identity which this author (white) is ill-advised to answer. but reeling it back in, the question mostly being of history, and how a lot of fantasy media draws more from History proper as a codified cultural body than histories being individuated familial experiences. its true that when a work does something unique with history (earthbounds hippy dippy approach to the 1960s, undertales handling of furry culture, yume nikkis south american murals) its tended to be seen as that works "thing" as if because hulk hogan was an all american wrestler that precluded john cena from being same, or at least, embodying a similar if slightly modified niche. nobody can make a hippy dippy rpg now or something because itd just be called an earthbound ripoff rather than a loving homage. and i think thats wrong headed and how genres become stillborn rather than invented and developed upon. we have this vast morass of stuff from the 20th century and we could be developing various 60s, 70s, 80s fantasies. hindsight is 20/20 i guess. who knows, we could see bluff city become something in 50 years time.

i feel this is because of extreme stringent expectations of intellectual property laws and their dissemination into everyday discourse online. i dont really like or agree with monolithic cultural expectations like intellectual property or *shudder* advertising, but only to the extent where i can acknowledge that whether or not i agree with them is irrelevant to their all-consuming scope and the need for marxists to actively combat them. its one thing to say "x is bad" and another to clamor for urgency of fighting x, which is, if you believe what we read every day about global warming, too late, so its not important. nevertheless there are a multiplicity of settings that could be developed into genres and identities and ideologues that rarely are if only because it would be seen as "oh yeah like that other thing". people are fickle and develop dwarflike strange moods when it comes to defining what constitutes original versus hackneyed and derivative. i think its mostly dictated by star signs and the weather.

so lately if you follow me on twitter youve probably noticed im doing sort of a tweet concrete kind of thing where i post plaintext quotes from various media taken out of context. i decided to do this for a while, maybe a few weeks, because aesthetic blogs and the aesthetic style of blogging allow me to pool and channel my energies towards larger and more ambitious styles of writing. i usually get loaded on caffeine during this process and frequently watch large amounts of anime and meditate some. its definitely a process and its geared toward something hazily, vaguely spiritual but with pretentions toward being authentically publishable as theory. the idea also being i would like to make some money to support my livelihood, and i like to write, and am somewhat skilled at it, or at least experienced in kind of a ramshackle homespun sort of way. so if my social media presence is pretty boring and kind of weirdly nostalgic or else contrariwise if you feel it has improved lately thats the reason why that happened.

ive been getting very hazy and foggy mentally lately. i feel like it has to do with caffeination and lack of sleep. its important to get everything flowing properly, and sometimes depression and anxiety make that difficult to do. theres anxiety over unemployment, something im trying to remedy, and theres anxiety over theory and where to proceed next via theory. for years i was a devout buddhist in some ways, and meditated a lot, almost every day. i prayed to the bodhisattvas and copped to buddhist metaphysics, something which, based around personal life experience, i had every reason to believe was true. lately and in my own, strange way, ive begun to question this ideology and interpret it as part of a patchwork of ideologies, each one which attempts to describe a totality, a totality which is rarely if ever described properly by any ideology. grasping at straws in a structural sense, and feeling nonplussed but with no ground to run to, and im back on the boss level in super mario 64 where bowser smashes the ground to make it fall away. attempts at restructuring as this dissolution transpires only serve to create new protocols equal in scope to pre-existing paradigms. and there are plenty of people who dont struggle this much with religion and probably still go to heaven, or think theyre going to heaven, or something. hows marge and the kids. did jerry get that new promotion. mom just got back from vacation in cancun. smalltalk style concerns arising in every day transitionary speech feel distinct and very distant from these kind of hazy, pie in the sky questions. plato never wrote about the kind of stuff you see in a cheers episode. there are philosophy books that try to merge the two, but they usually get shelved in the comedy section.

so its mostly a matter of trying to absorb and contain new information, which abides in abundance, and trying to corral it into sort of a pointing arrow to direct me where to go, in my hewing, a feat not easily done. probably the endgame is in the crafting and solution of art, but what kind of art, and whether i have the tools at my disposal to even create it, is less easily answered. so for now, i guess, im absorbing, waiting, asking questions, and who knows, and who can say.

earliest memories of religion are of the greco roman religion and not knowing about the mystery religious rites but knowing about an abstract concept of wisdom and the ocean and extrapolating the existence of athena and poseidon in that way. later i have memories of exposure to christianity and buddhism and bahai but none of these things feel particularly useful to me at this time in my life. i can more readily receive a picture, a kind of enlarged image, of a broad religious landscape and some of the questions it attempts to provide answers for, or at least, a way of thinking about. the greco roman religion, for instance, is a presentation of a deleuzian multiplicity, and the monotheistic religions are a monad, but i also dont think either of these things can say the other is inherently undesireable. tolerance seems to be the best method, but also, and likewise, not dwelling specifically in any of them. acknowledging they all exist, but not being any of them. enjoying in surfeit the tension between multiplicity and monad. that there can be many things and one thing. like the album cover of dark side of the moon.

#txt #text #religion #philosophy #dead ends?#thoughts

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donnerpartyofone · 7 years

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I've found myself looking at my relationship with my sister in a new light and wondering how to deal with drawing a line. I get along better with her than anyone I've ever met, but it really struck me how her anxiety reaction really conditioned me in a way that makes me walk on eggshells and focus on accommodating her above all else. I feel bad because I can't blame her for her anxiety but she can get somewhat abusive when she can't communicate what she needs and I don't know how to help her.

that’s really rough, thanks for talking about it. that definitely sounds like a situation you truly can’t do much about, if anything, it’s just a test of your character. i admire your perseverance. this might be way beyond your means, but it seems possible that some kind of joint counseling might be in order, to try to help her develop some better communication skills, and help you figure out how to put your foot down in a healthy productive way. i’m just speculating, though, that sounds really difficult.

i hope you won’t feel offended when i downshift into something much more casual. i’ve been obsessing over it and can’t think of what to do but vent. i’m struggling with this situation where i guess i COULD just say “you know what, i love you, but being friends with you takes away more energy than i get back.” i’m just kind of unwilling to do that, yet, and i don’t have a lot of experience separating from a friend in whom i still have a lot of emotional investment. ordinarily, i cut difficult people out way before they’re close enough to me to cause even slight problems; the only really dramatic rifts i’ve ever co-created were in romantic relationships. i’ll probably delete this in a bit, since it doesn’t really serve anything here, but for now i my erupt.

this dear friend of mine has really serious ADD and a complex of other problems for which she is medicated and sees several different mental health professionals. almost every time we interact, i have to think very deliberately about how she’s not ignoring me or taking me for granted or being argumentative or making laborious requirements of me on purpose, she has legitimate problems focusing and prioritizing, or noticing when she’s being destructive. we BASICALLY get along great; she’s extremely lovey dovey with me to the point of adulation, and we’ve shared a lot of hard times and personal secrets, so i know the relationship itself is real, even during the times when i can’t seem to get her respectful attention. it’s curious because she’s really pretty successful due to her genuine talent and charm, but once in a while she’s so disorganized and demanding that i think HOW COULD YOU HAVE POSSIBLY GOTTEN TO THIS PLACE IN YOUR LIFE.

here are a couple of good examples of what it can often be like to know her:

- she cuts my hair. i pay full price, as an actual customer, for this service, and it’s invariably complicated and maddening. i don’t want to stop going because she’s the only stylist i’ve ever been satisfied with, and also it would definitely cause emotional problems between us. but, she rearranges her schedule on me constantly, up to the very last minute, to the point that i’m standing around her neighborhood killing time and watching my phone to find out if and when i’m going to actually be seen. most recently, to try to avoid the usual problems, i emailed her more than two weeks in advance of the 26th, by which date i NEED to have my hair cut for a wedding. she told me to text her instead. i repeated the question via text, and she asked me repeatedly if i’m available saturday. i reexplained that, no, that would be a week and a half too early, i need it as near to the 26th as possible. she told me she’ll be out of town around then, but she’ll give me her latest availability. i never heard back. a week later my fiance texted her to ask if she can fit us both in for an appointment close to the 26th. she told us that she’s “waiting on a confirmation” from someone else (even though i had asked her a week prior), and then offered us “wednesday”. he asked if she means the 17th or the 24th. we didn’t hear anything for the rest of the day, even though the 17th was in less than 24 hours. at midnight she finally replied that she meant the 24th–exactly what i asked for in the first place.

- the following event, which could have taken two minutes, took place over about two weeks: she was working on a writing project. i offered to read it and give her some friendly feedback, if she wanted. she passionately insisted that she could NEVER take advantage of my talent for free, that she MUST pay me. i reminded her that i’m not a real editor, and i was just being friendly, but she INSISTED. so i say ok, what would you be willing to pay for this? she said she CAN’T decide what to pay me, I HAVE TO decide what my services are worth. i suggested that we could just trade for haircuts, but that was deemed to be too unprofessional for this imaginary reward she thinks i deserve. inventing a rate was difficult because i don’t deserve a professional rate, and i don’t even know what it would be. so, hypnotically embroiled in this stupid conversation, i did all this research and this fake math, and came back to her with a rate. she dramatically declared that she CANNOT afford it, and is therefore unworthy of my illustrious services. at this point i’m sitting there thinking…how the fuck did i get into this? all i did was offer to read her thing if she wanted a fresh pair of eyes. now i’ve spent two weeks negotiating and doing this pointless research project, just to build myself up to something that i’m not and don’t want to be, only to have her like sort of grovellingly fire herself from the situation because she’s so undeserving or whatever. of course, she wound up trading me haircuts. once the writing finally started, any time i gave her notes, it was a nightmare. if i was critical, she wouldn’t really buy my suggestions. if i was encouraging, she’d borderline call me a liar, as if i were ripping her off, and angrily insist that i be “brutally honest” and “tear her to shreds” etc. at that point, i would re-remind her that i’m not an editor, and it sounds like she knows what she needs–a real editor. eventually she let me off the hook, but almost only because she backburnered the project indefinitely while she works on something else.

this makes it sound like all i have to do is not get involved in anything vaguely professional with her, but it’s more pervasive than this. like, i’ll ask if she wants me to bring anything when i come over, and she’ll ask for a couple of small snacks, but then when i show up with them, she spins out into this thing about how i’m SO WONDERFUL and she feels SO BAD that she MADE ME bring her food, and her solution is to try to force me to keep the food, which was very cheap and which i don’t even want. i’ll have to argue with her about it intermittently for the rest of the night, and there’s nothing i can do to convince her that having this insane fight, about something i volunteered to do, is a much bigger inconvenience than the $3 i just spent on cliff bars for her. i suppose i could simplify all this by saying she’s the kind of person who will ask if you’re mad at her or something, and you say you’re not because you’re not, and then she’ll ask you again and again until you really ARE angry, at which point she thinks she was right all along. my fiance has noted that she doesn’t behave this extremely with him, and we often suspect that she’s instinctively recreating dramas that took place between her and her mother, or her and her ex-girlfriends or something, and i just happen to be a really good proxy for whatever the story was there. being tolerant of her makes her suspicious of me, but if i get aggravated, then i’m being untrue to myself, and getting wrapped up in some sort of mythology that isn’t actually about me.

she is fundamentally an exciting and affectionate person; she has tons of admiring friends, and interesting people always want to support her projects, for good reason. i value her friendship, and i don’t THINK i really want to part ways with her. however, i also don’t think she has the emotional stability to have a constructive conversation about her behavior (especially when she really craves for me to hate on her or something), and i haven’t seen her demonstrate an ability to change and control her behavior anyway. being the kind of person i am, i constantly fantasize about tying her to a chair and describing all the stuff that she does, how it doesn’t help her, and how it negatively impacts our relationship (and i’m sure many of her other relationships), and just totally deprogramming her with my brilliant logic–but of course that’s all complete nonsense. since i’m the one with control, i think i just have to train myself to stop getting so wound up and trying to envision how to “fix” her. i don’t even have to see her more than once a month, sometimes not even that often. i gotta get a grip.

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t-baba · 6 years

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Build George Costanza’s Bathroom Finder using WRLD

This article was sponsored by WRLD 3D. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

“Anywhere in the city? Anywhere in the city: I’ll tell you the best public toilet.”

These are the words of George Costanza to Jerry Seinfeld in 1991. In that episode of Seinfeld; the visionary George invented an app before his time - the bathroom finder! If you’re a frequent traveller, a parent, or just someone who knows the importance of a clean and well-maintained space for some "serenity", you'll understand the utility of this idea.

So, this time in the second tutorial of our WRLD series we’re going to build a… let's call it a "facility finder app".

It’s not the first time someone has tried this mind you. In 2010, bathroomreview.ca did just that (as described in Forbes). But the site is no longer operational.

We covered quite a bit of ground in the last tutorial, this time round, we’re going to reuse some of that learning. For instance, we’ll use ParcelJS to build our static files, but we won’t go into too much detail about how to set it up again. We’ll also highlight buildings and set the appropriate weather conditions and time of day, depending on what they are for the user. If you’re unsure about how these work, refer back to the previous tutorial.

In this tutorial, we’re going to cover these topics:

Creating a simple AdonisJS server-side API (to cache location data and handle CORS requests).

Requesting public facilities data, from refugerestrooms.org, if there are no cached locations within 10 meters of the user. We’ll use the Google Distance Matrix API to calculate the distance between points of interest.

Highlighting buildings with public facilities, colored to match their rating. Green for good, red for bad. Each building will have an info card for extra info (like how to reach the bathroom).

At the end, we’ll talk a bit about how to turn this kind of app into a viable business. That’s really the point of this isn't it? The WRLD APIs provide tools to visualise real-world data in a map of the real world. Our job is to work out how to use this technology for commercial applications!

The code for this tutorial can be found on Github. It has been tested with a modern versions or Firefox, Node, and macOS.

Getting Facility Data

Let’s begin by learning how to get the facility data, and the form we get it in. We’re going to use refugerestrooms.org as a source of data. We learn that we can search by latitude and longitude, by looking at the documentation. In fact, we can make the following request, and see a set of facilities close to my location:

curl http://ift.tt/2B67V5u? ↵ lat=-33.872571799999996&lng=18.6339362

There are a few other parameters we could be specifying (like whether to filter by accessible and/or unisex facilities), but the main thing this gives us is a way to plug coordinates into a search and get close-by locations.

We can’t just call this from the browser, though. There are all sorts of security reasons why this is disallowed. There are also performance reasons. What if 10 people made the same request, standing 10 meters apart from each other? It would be a waste to fire off 10 requests to the same remote server, when we could serve it faster from a caching proxy.

Instead, we’re going to set up a simple AdonisJS caching API. Our browser app will send requests to the AdonisJS API, and if there’s no “nearby” data; it will send a request to the Refuge API. We can’t spend too much time on the details of AdonisJS, so you’ll have to check out the documentation for details.

I’m also just about done writing a book about it, so that’s the best place to learn how it works!

The easiest way, to create a new AdonisJS app, is to install the command-line tool:

npm install --global @adonisjs/cli

This enables the adonis command-line globally. We can use it to create a new application skeleton:

adonis new proxy

This takes a little while, since it’s installed a few things. When it finishes, you should see a message to run the development server. This can be done with:

adonis serve --dev

Open up http://127.0.0.1:3333 in your browser, and you should be greeted by this beauty:

Creating Migrations and Models

Let’s story the search data in a database. AdonisJS supports a few different engines, but we’ll use SQLite for the sake of simplicity. We can install the appropriate driver, using:

npm install --save sqlite3

Next, let’s make a migration and a model. We’re only interested in the coordinates used to search, and the returned JSON. If the coordinates are close enough to where a user is searching for, we’ll reuse the existing search response instead of re-requesting the search data.

We can use the adonis command-line utility to create migrations and models:

adonis make:migration search adonis make:model search

That creates a couple files. The first is a migration, to which we can add three fields:

"use strict" const Schema = use("Schema") class SearchSchema extends Schema { up() { this.create("searches", table => { table.increments() table.string("latitude") table.string("longitude") table.text("response") table.timestamps() }) } down() { this.drop("searches") } } module.exports = SearchSchema

This is from proxy/database/migrations/x_search_schema.js

We’ve added the latitude, longitude, and response fields. The first two make sense as string even though they contain float data, because we want to do sub-string searches with them.

Next, let’s create a single API endpoint:

"use strict" const Route = use("Route") // we don't need this anymore... // Route.on("/").render("welcome") Route.get("search", ({ request, response }) => { const { latitude, longitude } = request.all() // ...do something with latitude and longitude })

This is from proxy/start/routes.js

Each AdonisJS route is defined in the routes.js file. Here, we’ve commented out the initial “welcome” route, and added a new “search” route. The closure is called with a context object; which has access to the request and request objects.

We can expect search requests to provide latitude and longitude query string parameters; and we can get these with request.all. We should check to see if we have any vaguely related coordinates. We can do this by using the Search model:

const Search = use("App/Models/Search") const searchablePoint = (raw, characters = 8) => { const abs = Math.abs(parseFloat(raw)) return parseFloat(abs.toString().substr(0, characters)) } Route.get("search", async ({ request, response }) => { const { latitude, longitude } = request.all() const searchableLatitude = searchablePoint(latitude) const searchableLongitude = searchablePoint(longitude) // console.log(searchableLatitude, searchableLongitude) const searches = await Search.query() .where("latitude", "like", `%${searchableLatitude}%`) .where("longitude", "like", `%${searchableLongitude}%`) .fetch() // console.log(searches.toJSON()) response.send("done") // ...do something with latitude and longitude })

This is from proxy/start/routes.js

We begin by importing the Search model. This is a code representation of the database table we created (using the migration). We’ll use this to query the database for “nearby” searches.

Before we can do that, we need a way to search for nearly coordinates. The searchablePoint function takes a raw coordinate string and creates an absolute float value, removing the optional - from the front of the string. Then, it returns the first 8 characters of the coordinate string. This will shorten -33.872527399999996 to 33.872527. We can then use these 8 characters in a SQL “where like” clause, to return all searches with similar coordinate strings.

AdonisJS uses the async and await keywords to great effect. Methods like Search.query return promises, so we can await their results while still writing 100% asynchronous code.

I’m skipping a lot of AdonisJS details, which I really don’t like doing. If you’re struggling with this part; speak to me on Twitter, and I’ll point you in the right direction.

Matching Nearby Locations

Now that we’ve got the “nearby” locations, we can compare their relative distances to where the user is standing. If you don’t yet have a Google API key, refer back to the previous tutorial for how to get one. We’re about to be the Google Distance Matrix service:

http://ift.tt/1zFyAP1? ↵ mode=walking& ↵ units=metric& ↵ origins=-33.872527399999996,18.6339164& ↵ destinations=-33.872527399999997,18.6339165& ↵ key=YOUR_API_KEY

The Distance Matrix service actually allows multiple origins, so we can combine all of your previous searches into a longish origin string:

const reduceSearches = (acc, search) => { const { latitude, longitude } = search return `${acc}|${latitude},${longitude}` } Route.get("search", async ({ request, response }) => { const { latitude, longitude } = request.all() // ...get searches const origins = searches .toJSON() .reduce(reduceSearches, "") .substr(1) // console.log(origins) response.send("done") // ...do something with latitude and longitude })

This is from proxy/start/routes.js

We can convert the search results into an array of objects. This is useful because we can reduce the array, combining each search’s latitude and longitude into a string. That string will begin with a |, so we need to get the string starting at index 1.

Continue reading %Build George Costanza’s Bathroom Finder using WRLD%

by Christopher Pitt via SitePoint http://ift.tt/2mIXn7Y

#CSS3 #HTML5 Branding #HTML5 Weekly #HTMLl5 demos #Javascript Branding #Javascript Weekly #Mobile #Mo

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curdinway-blog · 6 years

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Spirited Away

Spirited Away is the greatest anime film of all time. Its accolades stretch to astonishing heights; it won the Japan Academy Award for Best Picture, is the only foreign film to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and has been widely acclaimed by film critics as one of the finest animated films of the century. It smashed box office records in Japan, overtaking James Cameron’s fabled Titanic. It enjoyed robust box office drawings in the United States and worldwide as well. To this day, it is the most famous work from Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, and one of the most beloved and iconic animated features to ever grace the screen.

If there is any work that invites immediate comparisons, it is MGM’s classic The Wizard of Oz. Like that film, Spirited Away has plenty going on beneath the surface, but is celebrated most for the sheer scope of its imagination, bursts of color, and visual inventiveness. Miyazaki literally births a whole new world, limitless in its possibilities and bizarre to our normal expectations, and utterly rich in wonder. There are absurdly large babies, talking frogs, pieces of soot performing menial labor, and a 6-handed man working a furnace. The principal setting is one of the all-time greats; a dazzling, ritzy bathhouse for wayward spirits where humans are not welcome.

Into this strange new environment drops Chihiro, a girl still struggling to deal with an impending move. A new home and school end up seeming pretty mild by the time the girl’s parents turn into pigs and she is stuck wiling with an unscrupulous witch and a horde of wacky creatures for her freedom and survival. Spirited Away is a growing-up story, and a great one at that. Critics and audience have marveled at the way Chihiro progresses through the movie from apathetic, weak, and frightened to a newly self-reliant and strong person. The movie has also been lauded for its cleverly submerged themes. The problems faced by Haku, one of the resident spirits, and an appallingly gooped-up “stink spirit” are concerned nods at pollution and environmental concerns, while the workers’ lust for gold and Chihiro’s parents’ rude advances at a food stand are condemnations of greed.

The characters are some of Miyazaki’s best, and oh so memorable. Yubaba is a manipulative and opportunistic witch, whom you might hate if she were not so damn good at running that bathhouse. Haku is an amnesiac, whose current condition has him struggling to do good as he grows increasingly cold. Lin is a hilariously sour woman who takes Chihiro on as her protégé. But the best of all is No-Face, a sprite who goes from sad and lonely outcast to absolute blood-curdling nightmare in about zero to sixty, then somehow manages to reverse course again.

Leading and anchoring everything is Chihiro. Surely one of Miyazaki’s finest heroines, Chihiro was reportedly fashioned after the daughter of a friend who visited the director on occasion. As stated previously, her personal growth is remarkable characterization and a true joy. However, I have always been bothered by reviewers’ initial assertions of Chihiro. “Lazy”, “cowardly”, and “whiny” are common adjectives; even Miyazaki seemed to share the sentiment, referring to her and real-life girls her age as “lazy bums.” It is worth noting that the people Chihiro was a stand-in for are now roughly my age. That’s right; Miyazaki, a Baby Boomer, was trashing Millennials before it was cool (joking, of course). It is interesting that my assertion of Chihiro is so much different…and perhaps that is because I identify with Chihiro so much. Kids fear differently than adults do. Irrational fears predominate, and are often not given serious credence by adult figures…such as Chihiro’s parents. Childhood fears are often more deeply intense as well; catastrophic, paralyzing events made worse by the fact that children have not yet developed the emotional maturity and skills to manage them. To me, it is not at all unnatural for Chihiro to be depressed and upset by such an upending life event. I had difficulty managing my various fears well past her age. Chihiro’s apparent apathy may be a side-effect of her emotional struggles; alternatively, they may also simply represent a relative inexperience with work which is not out of place for someone of her years and maturity.

Moreover, Chihiro has a good heart. She consistently acts with sensitivity, compassion, and generosity throughout the movie, letting in No-Face when he is left outside in the rain, pursuing friendship and meaningful relationships over wealth, and risking her own safety and comfort repeatedly to help loved ones and strangers alike. This is in marked opposition to the characters around her, who manage to be far more efficient, resilient, and self-reliant than her, but are also motivated by empty capital (gold), are consistently self-serving, and lack emotional warmth and compassion. When Miyazaki criticized girls like Chihiro as “lazy bums”, he also added that he knew they had tremendous potential as well. Notice that when the “stink spirit” enters the bathhouse, it is Chihiro who recognizes the problem instead of just trying to get the job over with and the unwanted guest out. Her removal of tangles of garbage from the spirit’s side is symbolic of environmental clean-up; suggesting Miyazaki believes Chihiro and her kind will bring greater emphasis and effort towards meaningful environmental protection. Extrapolate further, and you can say the same for social empathy and non-materialism. If we truly take this analysis to the extreme and consider Chihiro to be a surrogate for Millennials and the bathhouse workers to be a surrogate for Baby Boomers, an interesting dynamic emerges. Chihiro learns from her stewards’ tough love to become an independent, resilient, and confident actor so that she can bring her inner disposition forth to do good in the world. At the same time, Chihiro gradually thaws her teachers, so that they can act more empathetically and selflessly. This successful generational interplay helps both parties to better themselves; perhaps, an applicable lesson for today’s divided society.

One of the finest aspects of Spirited Away is in that it refuses to sugarcoat the process of growing up. There are a lot of joys to be had, for sure; Chihiro has a grand adventure, after all, making new friends, overcoming obstacles, and opening her horizon to beautiful new things. However, there is definitely a darker side towards becoming an adult. Fear and uncertainty are an easy observation in her maturation and in ours; the only way to improve one’s mettle is to test it. Less apparent to me, at least the first time around, was Miyazaki’s less-than-flattering critique of the modern workplace. Essentially, once Chihiro becomes employed at the bathhouse she is treated as an adult, and we become proxy to a fascinating array of observations. First, there is the perception of being trapped. Whether it is Yubaba’s contract, Chihiro’s obligations to her now-pig family, Lin’s lamentations that she would love to leave the place, or the liberation presented by a train ticket away, the bathhouse’s oppressive atmosphere is an easy stand-in for many modern workplaces. There is also notably an aspect of distance and isolation to everyone who works there; in Haku’s case, the longer he has worked there, the colder and more aloof he has become. The necessity to watch out for one’s self as an adult separates us from one another, Miyazaki argues. That effect is a mere trickle into the core vein running throughout the movie: loneliness.

Notice the water which surrounds the bathhouse. On my second viewing, it struck me that the supernatural flooding is not merely a plot device to prevent Chihiro from escaping her situation; it is also a visual representation of the world as viewed by an adult. The infinite horizon of its waters provokes the vast expansion of worldview that comes with growing up, but also an increasing sense of solitude, emptiness, and personal reflection. Joe Hisaishi’s wonderfully sensitive score frequently adopts a longing, minimalist tone, and we feel a certain absence and sadness in the events happening onscreen. Of all Chihiro’s various trials, the impact of loneliness strikes most devastating and realistic of all. Miyazaki’s solution to this common adult malady is friendship. The essential nature of friends to a normal and healthy adult life is driven home by Chihiro’s experiences. Fear, threats, and harsh treatment do not significantly transform Chihiro. It is only when she is approached from a place of support and caring that she finds courage and stability to act with decision, and the confidence in herself to succeed and respond to failures. Even as relationships with family fade, the relationships we form with others can help us reform a socially abundant life so that we can thrive and be happy.

Growing up is a process. Fraught with peril and difficulties, chock-full of excitement and rewards, it is as tumultuous and constant throughout life as it is necessary. The fear we have as children towards change may mute somewhat as we grow older, but it is still ever-present, accompanied by a second, sharper note…nostalgia. The takeaway message of Spirited Away is that we don’t really have to be afraid, because we’ve been there before. By the end of the film, it is not entirely clear what Chihiro will be facing next. She has no guarantee of ever revisiting her friends at the bathhouse, or her friend from her former school. But she has stopped looking backward towards what has been, and is looking down the road to whatever comes next, reassured by the fact that whatever happens, she can handle it. That is what matters.

That is what growing up is all about.

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