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manorpunk · 2 months

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2️⃣

‘Comprador’ refers to an agent of a large multinational corporation whose typical job responsibility is taking a small underdeveloped nation and turning it into a vending machine for a natural resource - oil, coffee, coal, minerals - then getting that nation so dependent on selling those raw materials to that company that they effectively control it.

Unrelatedly, the Global Logistics Network was the single largest anything of 2069.

They weren’t a monopoly, no, no, no. They were… you see, the crowded and fragile system of intercontinental shipping was simply too important to be left in the hands of any single nation. You all saw what happened when the Brits monopolized it, and when the US monopolized it after them. You’ve seen how nations owning major canals turns them into a hive of corruption. Shipping belongs to the world, which means it belongs to the GLN.

They were headquartered in Qingdao, a major city in the Shandong province of China. Don’t be fooled, China fumbled the past few decades as much as everyone else, but every institution needs a head, and every head needs a headquarters, and the headquarters of the Global Logistics Network were located in Qingdao. The complex of skyscrapers that comprised GLNHQ was large and populous enough to form its own city-state, a closed loop of offices, gyms, fabricators, dormitories, labs, shops, copackers, cafeterias, and warehouses. You could spend your whole life there without ever setting foot on the earth itself. Many did.

Such was the Global Logistics Network. Like capitalism rising centuries ago from the sclerotic and shambling remnants of feudalism, the GLN rose from the old ways of hyper-financialized over-leveraged capitalism to create something new, something so new it didn’t even have a name yet. Much like the transition from feudalism to capitalism, things were better overall, but good lord, what a low bar to clear.

Towering above it all at the top floor of the central skyscraper sat Meng “Harold” Jianli, sole co-founder of the GLN. One might wonder how someone could be a ‘sole co-founder,’ and the answer was that the GLN was so powerful and omnipresent that its leader could have called himself a living god for all the power that sat upon his person. He certainly had more power than those who had historically claimed the title of living god.

But Meng “Harold” Jianli was no god, living or otherwise. Despite the vast power seated upon his person, or perhaps because of it,he looked rather disheveled, with a jowly face like splotchy old parchment, a sagging belly, and a crudely functional flat-top of black hair. His suit was slack and rumpled - his weight had a tendency to fluctuate wildly thanks to the stress.

It was stressful, being in charge. Past a certain point, you don’t really get more powerful, you just have more people to babysit and more fires to put out. He had to keep an eye on Novo Karo Bioresearch, or they’d be so excited to show off their new research that they’d start doing eugenics. He had to keep an eye on Vae Victis Engineering, or they’d get so excited testing out their new tech that they’d start a world war. And now, with his hands steepled and his brow furrowed, he had to keep an eye on the vtuber that the American League had elected president.

He stared at Sunny Roosevelt. Sunny smiled back and gave him a little wave.

“I am willing to work with you, miss Roosevelt. The GLN is willing to work with just about anyone, it’s one of our biggest strengths.” He shifted effortlessly between ‘I’ and ‘we,’ treating the two as synonyms. “The issue is, we are still trying to figure out what your administration actually intends to do.”

“Hmm.” Sunny put a finger to her chin, pursed her lips, and looked upward. An ellipsis appeared over her head. “You got a copy of my campaign objectives, right?”

“Are you referring to this?” He held up a single sheet of paper, on which was written ‘make anime real’ in 48-point font and nothing else.

“Yep!”

“And you think this qualifies as a roadmap for your presidency.”

“Personally, I think it’s quite ambitious.”

Harold puttered his lips. “Miss Roosevelt-”

“Please, call me ‘mommy.’”

“Miss Roosevelt, I understand that you are standing on rather shaky ground. The National Board of Directors is being dragged away from the provisional US government days,” he said, which neglected to mention how half of the National Board of Directors were former GLN big names, “and the new state congress acts more like a rehab clinic for celebrity podcasters than a governing body,” he said, which stood just fine without caveats.

“I understand,” Sunny said, nodding and still smiling, “I’m a bimbo who’s in way over her head, so you’re going to unveil the GLN’s big five year plan and tell me to follow it like a good little girl.”

Harold was already in the process of lifting a hefty unlabeled binder, intending to thump it dramatically atop his desk, but the accuracy of Sunny’s comment left him slightly deflated. “I prefer to think of it as an advisory-”

“And then I’ll kiss up to you during our conversations,” Sunny continued, “but stall and drag my feet when it comes to actually implementing anything, and you’ll say,” she loosened her face and dropped her voice, “dammit Sunny, are you trying to play me for a fool?”

“I don’t sound like that. I don’t sound like Richard Nixon,” Harold protested, sounding kind of like Richard Nixon.

“And then I’ll say, it’s not me, it’s the state governors, they just refuse to cooperate. The new congress is one big old boy’s club. Even the Board of Directors is demanding overly-detailed descriptions of everything before they’ll sign off on it, it’s malicious compliance!” Sunny hung her head and threw her hands, wailing, “you set me up to fail, Harold. You set me up to fail, you rat bastard!”

“Are you done?”

Sunny straightened back up. There was that smile again. “Yep. That was fun.”

“In any case, while I understand you are currently something of a figurehead, even figureheads cannot afford to do nothing. Not when a third of the country is still lacking even the barest measures of centralized government.”

“What, you mean the Midwest Autonomous Zone?” A little question mark appeared over Sunny's head. “I mean, yeah, but it’s not like that started with the fall of the old US. Missouri was a dump long before the thirties.”

“Be that as it may-”

“That’s the 2030s, because we’re in the future.”

“Miss Roosevelt.”

“Please, call m-”

“No. Miss Roosevelt, why did you become president if you are so averse to actually presiding?”

Sunny shrugged and let out a huffy little sigh. “Look, most people weren’t exactly begging to have America back. Not even Americans. They don’t want someone with a bold, inspirational vision. Bold, inspirational visions are what start world wars, for George’s sake. I, for one, believe that bench-warming is not just a good idea but a moral imperative.”

“George’s sake?” Harold repeated.

“Saint George Washington. Oh, right, America’s got a brand new religion now, it’s called Founderism. We took the whole Founding Father worship thing and made it an official heresy. Also, Jesus was a small business owner.”

Harold grimaced and considered leaving the former USA to the wolves for a few more decades.

#Heaven is Falling #writing #sunny roosevelt #meng ‘harold’ jianli

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voraciousvore · 2 months

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Giganterra (Chapter 9)

Prologue/ TOC | Previous (8) | Next (10)

^ The giant royal family's coat of arms, briefly mentioned in this chapter. In heraldry, black (sable) represents grief, purple (purpure) represents royalty, and silver (argent) represents peace. In this case, "peace" is twisted to be a self-serving endorsement of the status quo, since it is easy for King Richard to desire and maintain peace when he's already at the apex of the hierarchy.

Content Warning: Vore themes

Word Count: 3.3k

------ Chapter 9: The Land of the Giants ------

The humans trembled in their cage as they listened to the giant men argue. To be spoken of as if they were nothing more than property—or worse, food—foreshadowed the treatment they would receive in Giganterra. Even Candy, who only had eyes for her giant knight, turned white as a ghost as she watched Chester nearly eat the peasant woman whole like a snack. Would the object of her desire be tempted to eat her like that, since he was a giant too? She glanced over at Sir Maneater, observing his facial expressions closely. He appeared upset over the whole incident, but her mind wasn’t entirely at ease.

Eren was surprised to see Joey, the giant whom she pricked with arrows like a pincushion, prevent the human woman from being devoured, and then defend their humanity with such passion. She thought, perhaps, that she had misjudged him; yet, he was still here with the others, enforcing the will of the king and allowing humans to be taken like livestock. She gritted her teeth. In the end, all giants were the same. He didn’t really see humans as equals; she was certain his protests were some form of cognitive dissonance that would iron out with time. She hated giants, every last one. She was tired of living under their control like an animal. She was determined to infiltrate the castle and cause bloody chaos, whatever the cost.

The rest of the humans were not doing well at all. Jackie was having some sort of mental breakdown from being swallowed alive, which only worsened when she witnessed Chester nearly consume another human. She was crying, whimpering, and shaking uncontrollably. Tanya worked hard to comfort her, not only to help Jackie but to distract herself from her own terrified thoughts that threatened to overwhelm her. She didn’t know what else she could possibly do, lest she drown in panic.

Gio stared into the abyss, lost in his own tortured mind. The betrayal hurt as much as a knife to his back. He kept replaying the king’s expression as he abandoned him, over and over in his head in an endless loop. This was how he was compensated for his years of loyal service, for going above and beyond his defined responsibilities to ensure the king always had what he required. He knew he was of lowly station, compared to royalty, but he didn’t expect to be thrown away like garbage at the mildest inconvenience. He had always respected and admired the king for being stoic in the face of adversity, and for retaining his composure despite the difficult decisions he was compelled to make. Now, he saw it all in a different, less flattering light. The king didn’t make sacrifices: He simply passed the burden onto his subjects. His heart filled with bitterness.

Addison hid under one of the seats, curled up in a tight ball. She didn’t want to be here; she didn’t want to be anywhere. She’d been nothing more than a waste of space at home, a painful fact that her mother was sure to remind her of constantly. Being worth something for once, even as a commodity, was slim comfort when compared to the horrors she would face in the clutches of giants. She understood all too well the futility of talking back or resisting against such behemoths, when she didn’t even have the courage to stand up to someone her own size. She was terrified.

Graham’s world had been thrown upside down, yet again. He thought his life was bad enough when he’d been wrongly convicted of a crime he didn’t commit, based on flimsy circumstantial evidence. He’d spent months in a gloomy, damp dungeon, lamenting his fate and praying for salvation. And this was the answer to his prayers: to be thrown into an even worse position. He would probably die soon, as fodder for one of these enormous flesh-eating beasts in the shape of men. He slumped on his side, not bothering to get up. What was the point? His days were numbered.

The giants passed through the border checkpoint. The guards leered into the cage with covetous eyes, grinning wide to show off their huge teeth and licking their chops. The humans felt very small and vulnerable, like trapped mice in a barn full of cats. Leon reclaimed his horse and strapped the cage to the back of the saddle. He tried his best to make the humans as comfortable as possible, placing padding underneath their enclosure so the ride would be less bumpy. He stifled an urge to apologize for their hideously unfair, dehumanizing treatment. He knew that his words would ring hollow and meaningless when they failed to match his actions.

None of the humans had ever been in giant territory, so they were bewildered to find everything, not just the people, so unfathomably large. The giant horse was an absolute monster, snorting and stamping impatiently with mammoth strength. When Leon stepped away from his horse to aid Joey, a gigantic crow landed on the cage and pecked at the bars with curiosity. The humans darted away from the huge beak, staring up at fearsome sharp talons big enough to snatch a human off the ground and carry him away. Its hoarse caw was deafening, the glossy black feathers rustling as loudly as flowing water in a stream.

Leon came back and shooed the giant bird away. The humans cringed away from his waving hand, which was just as scary as the crow, if not more so. The entire cage rocked and jumped as Leon mounted his horse and settled his tremendous bulk into the saddle. His back rose above into the sky like a monument. The tumultuous bumps of the horse trotting were even more jarring. The tiny folk stared in astonishment up at trees that seemed to tower into infinity, fantastically girthy and tall. A crosswind slapped a giant leaf the size of a comforter against the bars, with veins like thick tubes. The leaf skittered over the metal and was tossed away with the wind.

Chester, who happened to be riding downwind from Leon, perked his head up and sniffed intently. “Stop a moment,” he instructed. Leon, Joey, and Martin reined in their horses and looked over at him, wondering what was going on. “I smell a human.”

“Well, of course you smell humans, we have-” Joey began.

“No,” Chester cut him off. “A different human. Not one of the humans in the cage.” He dismounted his horse and tracked the scent with his nose. He prowled up to Leon and placed a hand on his saddle, next to the cage, snuffling noisily. The humans shirked away to the opposite side, fearful of the voracious giant looming above them, whom they knew wouldn’t hesitate to scarf them down if he got the chance. He circled around the horse’s hindquarters to the other side, mouth watering as the various human aromas filled his nostrils. Suddenly, he aggressively grabbed Leon’s leg and hoisted it up.

“Hey!” Leon cried out. “What are you doing?”

Chester ignored him, pulled up the cuff of his trousers, and clasped his ankle. He dragged a tiny man from the folds of fabric and dangled him in front of his face with a distrustful squint. “You!”

“Ooh, hey there big boy,” Cesar flirted, curling a strand of his wavy hair around his finger. “You found me, you lucky dog! Hungry for some appetizing man flesh, perchance?” He winked and flashed a pearlescent smile as he rubbed his hand down his body suggestively.

Chester cocked a brow. “Cheeky runt. I’d be interested in eating you if you didn’t taste like dog food,” he complained. Cesar’s face fell.

“Awww, c’mon! I can’t be that bad!” he protested.

“You’re pretty awful. Not worthy of a princess.” Chester turned his nose up at the inferior offering. “I couldn’t serve you to Princess Bianca in good faith.”

“We’re not too far from the border. We can still return him to the human lands,” Sir Maneater suggested. Joey nodded in agreement.

“No, don’t take me back!” Cesar pleaded. “Please, I have more value than just my taste! I’ll do anything to make the princess happy! She’ll adore me, trust me! Where else will she find a human that’s willing to obey her every whim?”

Sir Maneater shook his head. Joey stared at Cesar with confusion. He couldn’t believe a human would actually be begging to become a plaything for the giantess princess. Chester examined the man like a doll, picking at his limbs and rolling him over in his huge hands. “Hmmmmm. She’s very picky, you know.”

“Please,” Cesar repeated. Chester sighed as he looked at his earnest, handsome little face.

“Fine. I’ll let Princess Bianca make the determination. I’m sure she can find a use for you, even if you’re not suitable for eating,” Chester conceded. Cesar squealed with joy, clapping his hands as Chester dropped him unceremoniously into his breast pocket. He wanted to keep him, as inferior stock, separate from the other tributes that he deemed worthy. “Let’s keep going.”

As they entered more inhabited areas, the humans were nonplussed to see modest peasant cottages that exceeded the square footage and height of the king’s palace tenfold. A single stalk of giant vegetables or fruits in the boundless fields could feed the entire human capital for a month. The roads were wide enough to fit several human farms all in a line.

When the horses trotted into the city, the humans were assaulted with a cacophony of giant voices, sounds, sights, smells, and other stimuli. The metal bars, while oppressive, at least served as a barrier between them and the rest of the larger world, as slim as the protection was. They were fully surrounded by a whirlwind of giants of all shapes and social classes, working and talking and engaging in a wide variety of activities. The buildings stretched higher into the heavens than any of the little humans could comprehend. They felt smaller than ever, like insects trying to comprehend the universe.

The giant palace was even more immense, with great towers and imposing walls of stone. The entire kingdom of Minimaterra could probably be tucked away within its boundaries. Once the giant men with their horses entered through the gates, the walls that encompassed the courtyard muted the louder noise of the surrounding city. The only sounds were the clip-clopping of horse hooves on the vast landscape of stone bricks and the trickling of water from a fountain that produced a natural stream through a giant garden of trees and flowers. The humans gazed in wonder at the gargantuan hedges and statues, which were even bigger than the giants.

The men reached the stables and dismounted their horses. Leon unstrapped the cage and gingerly held it in his hands, staring down sadly at the humans inside in grim contemplation. Joey and Sir Maneater stayed with the horses to unload the gear and put the beasts away while Chester and Leon continued to the castle. Candy clung to the bars, looking back with fervent desire at Sir Maneater until he was hidden from view by Leon’s mass. A shadow fell over her heart as cold reality began to seep in. The knight hadn’t attempted to talk to her or hold her, not even once. Were her feelings unrequited? She’d hoped, deep down, that he would’ve been willing to save her. She believed they had a connection: Was she in error? Had she made a terrible mistake?

They entered the castle through huge creaking doors. The inside was breathtaking, consisting of a great hall with ornate chandeliers of gold and crystal hanging from the ceiling, lush purple carpets with gold threading, and magnificent spiral staircases branching off to different wings of the castle. The walls were lined with doors and extremely tall windows with elegant glasswork to let in the sun, framed with velvety curtains. The scaffolding and molding were pure artistry, every inch carved and painted with elaborate decorative patterns. Banners and flags suspended from the walls displayed the royal family’s coat of arms: a sable wolf on a checkered purple and silver background.

Smooth marble busts of the king and his progeny lined one of the inner walls, along with a gigantic portrait of the king in oils. As Candy’s eyes wandered over the titanic room and grazed the mammoth painting, her heart stopped. She recognized the man in the painting, with his silvery hair, sharp features, and icy blue eyes. He was the very same giant she witnessed in the soothsayer’s crystal ball, tormenting her alternate self with a sadistic leer. While his expression was portrayed as serious, Candy fancied she could see the ghost of a sinister smirk playing on his lips. She paled with dread. She had indeed made a terrible mistake.

Leon and Chester requested an audience with the king and waited patiently for approval. Candy, along with the others, broke into a cold sweat as the tension among them hung thick in the air. They weren’t sure what to expect, but whatever fate may hold, their future couldn’t be anything good. They didn’t have long to dwell on potential nightmares, for their giant keepers were ushered into a room that looked like a giant study, with a desk stacked with quills and parchment and a fancy brass oil lamp. The stuffed head of a proud buck with a splendid rack of antlers was mounted on the wall. The king was there, leaning back in his chair with his chin resting in his palm, with a look of cold boredom on his features. An overworked and flustered servant sat at the desk frantically scribbling on one of the pages. The king’s gigantic guard, his menacing shadow, stood a few paces off to the side of his chair, as immobile as a stone statue.

“Your Majesty,” Leon uttered with an affect of reverence, lowering into a deep bow. Chester mirrored him while the humans lurched in their cage at the wide movement. The king’s frigid eyes rotated over to his inferiors with condescension, but his face lit up when he spied the cage full of people.

“Ah, the tribute! Excellent!” he boomed in a deep, commanding voice that made the humans shudder. He turned his attention to his scribe. “Fetch me the prince and princess.”

“Yes, sire!” the servant cried, bowing fervently as he scuttled out of the study. The king held out a hand in a graceful movement, and Leon offered him the cage. His hands, huge and bony, curled around the cage as he raised it up to his face to examine his bounty. Adorning his fingers were several rings, fashioned with precious metals and gemstones, that clinked against the iron bars as he softly tapped the cage with anticipation. His irises burned with frigid fire as he studied each specimen, lips parted as they peeled back from large square teeth into a cruel leer.

“Mmmm… such a fine variety of young ladies,” he purred, devouring them with his eyes. They paused on Candy, the large black pupils dilating, and she nearly fainted with fear. His fingertips absently petted the bars as his rising appetites sought satiation; his imagination ravished the delicate feminine flesh within.

“Crown Prince Ronny and Princess Bianca!” the servant announced as the king’s children entered the room. “His Majesty, King Richard!” Chester and Leon bowed again. The humans got their first glimpse of the giant prince and princess. Ronny was hardly distinguishable from his bust, with handsome, haughty features that could’ve been chiseled from marble, and were just as pale and cold. His pasty skin was contrasted by his dark eyes and mid-length black hair, which was slicked back on his head to a glossy shine. His younger sister, by contrast, was warm and radiant, with bright hazel eyes and sensual curves. She was blessed with long black hair that flowed like rivers down her elegant back and shoulders.

“Enough with the titles,” King Richard said with a dismissive hand wave. “Go prepare the human habitats.” The servant vanished. The king smiled, raising up the cage with a slight bend of his wrists. “Look what we have here.”

Ronny grunted with indifference. His expression seemed to be molded permanently into an arrogant scowl. Bianca lit up with joy, leaning down to peer into the cage. She gasped. “Daddy, you got me MEN?” Gio and Graham stiffened.

“Of course, my darling. Anything for my little girl,” Hardon replied in honeyed tones.

Bianca squealed with delight. “Gimme!” She ripped open the door of the cage with startling force to the tiny humans and snaked her hand inside like a monster with gaping jaws, ready to snap up its prey. The two small men had no time to evade her grasp as her fingers ensnared them both in a tight fist. She tore them out and lifted them high in the air, ignoring their pitiful cries of protest. They shirked away from the gigantic hazel irises that scrutinized them with disturbing eagerness.

“Eeeeeek! They’re so cute!” she gushed with a hungry grin. The praise only frightened the poor men more. Ronny rolled his eyes.

“If I may, Your Highness…” Chester piped up with a small cough. She turned towards him, implicitly giving him permission to speak. He reached into his pocket and revealed Cesar, dangling him by the collar of his shirt. “This one is a bit of an extra. Regrettably, he doesn’t taste very good… but I thought perhaps you’d like him anyway.”

Cesar gaped when he beheld the beauty of the colossal giantess before him. She took him in her hand and he blushed hard, struggling to contain himself as her massive fingers curled intimately around his body. “Oh… oh my…” He wasn’t the shy type, but he was overcome enough to be rendered almost speechless. “What a woman…”

“I’ll take him!” she chirped happily. Without any further ado, she skipped out of the room, beaming as she squeezed her new toys in her hands.

“Ronny, you may choose one as well,” King Richard uttered, offering the selection to his son.

“Ugh… one of those little rats? No thanks,” the prince growled.

“Ronny.” The king’s voice dropped into a low growl. “Take one.” His tone didn’t leave any room for negotiation.

A raw shiver ran up Ronny’s spine like an icy claw. “Fine,” he snapped, though he had lost his edge. He wrenched open the door violently and thrust his hand inside. He didn’t bother to look at which human he was grabbing; he didn’t care. He didn’t want one, but he didn’t have a choice when his father was forcing him. He didn’t dare disobey.

The unfortunate lady he snatched was Tanya. “Unhand me, you brute!” she yelled, attacking his fingers. The other humans cringed at her boldness, afraid of what the giant prince was capable of. Ronny glared down at her with the upmost contempt. He tightened his fingers around her, crushing the air out of her lungs and forcing her into silence. She strained for breath, slumping into his fist. He paused, thinking to himself before leaving without another word.

King Richard watched Ronny go. His pale eyes narrowed and he withdrew as he contemplated his son with dissatisfaction. Chester and Leon waited for him, not sure what to do. Finally, Leon indicated he wished to speak, and the king allowed him.

“S-sire? Aren’t you going to choose one?” Leon asked timidly. “I’ll send the remainder to the kitchen for you, if you’d like…”

“No,” Hardon boomed. He leered over the cage, smacking his chops as a crazed gleam entered his pale eyes. “I want them all, right now.”

Chapter 10

#giant #g/t #giant/tiny #g/t writing #tiny #giant tiny #size difference #g/t story #g/t fearplay #giantess #sizetumblr #macro/micro #giant men #vore story #my art

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justforbooks · 2 months

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Daniel Dennett

Controversial US philosopher who sought to understand and explain the science of the mind

Daniel Dennett, who has died aged 82, was a controversial philosopher whose writing on consciousness, artificial intelligence, cognitive science and evolutionary psychology helped shift Anglo-American philosophy from its focus on language and concepts towards a coalition with science.

His naturalistic account of consciousness, purged as far as possible of first-person agency and qualitative experience, has been popular outside academia and hotly opposed by many within it.

One of the so-called Four Horsemen of New Atheism, along with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, he also wrote on Darwinism, memes, free will and religion.

“Figuring out as a philosopher how brains could be, or support, or explain, or cause, minds” was how Dennett, aged 21, defined his project. Having gained a philosophy degree at Harvard University in 1963, he was then doing a BPhil at Oxford University under the behaviourist philosopher Gilbert Ryle, but spent most of his time in the Radcliffe science library learning about the brain.

Many philosophers were (as they still are) trying to accommodate the mind, and its subjectivity, in third-person science. Yet it seems impossible to identify “intentionality” (the “aboutness” of thoughts) or “qualia” (the “thusnesses” of experience) as nothing but brain states or behaviour.

In dealing with “intentionality”, Dennett, however, had a novel strategy – “first content, then consciousness” – that reversed the usual line of enquiry. He proposed “to understand how consciousness is possible by understanding how unconscious content is possible first”.

Nature, he argued, has its own unwitting reasons – “free-floating rationales” that are “independent of, and more fundamental than, consciousness”. The ability of organisms to respond appropriately, if unconsciously, to things in the environment is a “rudimentary intentionality”. And, over aeons, the “blind, foresightless, purposeless process of trial and error” has knitted “the mechanical responses of ‘stupid’ neurons” (in certain creatures’ brains) into a “reflective loop [that] creates the manifest illusion of consciousness,” he thought. “Mind is the effect, not the cause.” As spiders mindlessly spin webs, homo sapiens has spun “a narrative self”.

What Ryle had dismissed as “the ghost in the machine” could thus be exorcised, not by denying its existence but by seeing it for what it is – a conjuring trick rather than magic, an illusion fabricated by what (in his 1995 book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea) he called evolution’s “reverse engineering”.

Dennett’s first book, Content and Consciousness was published in 1969. Sixteen other books and numerous papers adapted and extended its thesis – that intentionality can be ascribed, along a spectrum with no clear dividing line, impartially to minds, human brains, bees, computers, thermostats: it is a functional relation between object and environment. As to exactly when, in evolutionary or personal history, conscious intentionality arose, “don’t ask,” he said.

We can take what he called a “physical stance” towards something (considering its constituents and their causal interlockings) or a “design stance” (seeing it as fabricated, by evolution or humans, to serve a particular function) or an “intentional stance” (explaining its behaviour in terms of goals that it would sensibly pursue if it were rational).

“The intentional stance is thus a theory-neutral way of capturing the cognitive competences of different organisms (or other agents) without committing the investigator to overspecific hypotheses about the internal structures that underlie the competences.” We treat chess-playing computers, some animals and humans, as if they had beliefs and desires. But, he was furiously asked, don’t we humans actually have them?

Yes and no, apparently. There is no one-to-one match between brain states and mental states. It is the creature as a whole that has intentionality. The discrete individually identifiable mental states that we seem to be having are (in reality) “an edited and metaphorialised version of what’s going on in our brains” – equivalent to “user illusions” on a computer screen: like the hourglass, folder and dustbin icons, they betoken the complex processes occurring behind the scenes.

“No part of the brain is the thinker that does the thinking, or the feeler that does the feeling,” said Dennett, nor is, or does, the brain as a whole. Instead there are “multiple channels in which specialist circuits try, in parallel pandemoniums, to do their various things, creating multiple drafts as they go” – until, from among “concurrent contentful events in the brain … a select subset of such events ‘wins’ … The way to explain the miraculous-seeming powers of an intelligent intentional system is to decompose it into hierarchically structured teams.” These consist of “relatively ignorant, narrow-minded, blind homunculi that produce the intelligent behaviour of the whole”.

“Yes we have a soul but it’s made of lots of tiny robots” was the headline of an article about him in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, and Dennett endorsed it with amusement. He loved making furniture, building fences, mending roofs, tinkering with cars and boats; and, among the many things he constructed were sets of nested Russian dolls to illustrate his philosophy. The outside doll was “Descartes”; inside that was “the Middle Ghost” (a reference to Ryle’s) – but inside that was a “Robot”. “We are not authorities about our own consciousness,” he said. The robot is masked by the ghost.

Dennett pronounced qualia to be illusions. Ever since Descartes, we have tended to assume that we have “mental images”, as if, said Dennett, we could view little pictures, visible only to ourselves in an inner “Cartesian theatre”.

If so, we should be able to count the number of stripes on the tiger we are imagining, and say whether we have been seeing it face-on or sideways. No such definite information is available. Mental images are indeterminate in a way that pictures cannot be, and closer to generalised linguistic descriptions. So limited and poor is our access to our own conscious experiences, said Dennett, that it “does not differ much from the access another person can have to those experiences – your experiences – if you decide to go public with your account”. Indeed “our first-person point of view of our own minds is not so different from our second-person point of view of others’ minds”. We take an intentional stance on ourselves.

Dennett’s views remained pretty consistent throughout numerous books and papers, but in recent years he became more lenient towards mental imagery. He was impressed by neuroscientific research suggesting that there are specific observable brain activities that potentially may be decoded as imaging processes.

And, having been stern in denying what is disparagingly called “folk psychology” (a term he invented), he began to describe himself as “a mild realist” about mental states, prepared to concede that “the traditional psychological perspective” is not merely something described by third-person observers.

Avoiding accusations that he smuggled in the subjectivity he so adamantly denied, Dennett had recourse to “memes”, a concept (invented by Dawkins) modelled on that of genes. Memes are units of cultural practice, including anything from language to drama to wearing a baseball cap backwards to clapping as a form of praise. They are, in Dennett’s words, ‘“prescriptions” for ways of doing things that can be transmitted to, and from, human brains, and that “have their own reproductive fitness, just like viruses”. We are infected by memes, and it is “the memes invasion … that has turned our brains into minds”.

Dennett also applied a Darwinian approach to free will. “A billion years ago, there was no free will on this planet, but now there is. The physics has not changed; the improvements in ‘can do’ over the years had to evolve.” We are now able to predict probable futures, and to pursue or avert them. We are not deluded about having that capacity; as we are, he fulminated, about religion. Breaking the Spell (2006) was judiciously named. That was what he was urging religious people to do.

Born in Boston, Dennett spent the first five years of his life in Lebanon. His father, also Daniel, was a counter-intelligence officer posing as a cultural attache to the American embassy in Beirut. He died in a plane crash in 1947 (later, Dennett’s sister, the investigative journalist Charlotte Dennett, would claim Kim Philby’s connivance in it). Dennett’s mother, Ruth Leck, a teacher and editor, took the children back to Massachusetts.

Reprieved from matching up to his father’s expectations, Dennett said, he nonetheless grew up in his father’s shadow. But little could sap his exuberant self-confidence. Characteristically, the title of his 1991 book was Consciousness Explained.

In 1959, having just begun a maths degree at Weslyan University, Connecticut, Dennett read Willard van Orman Quine’s From a Logical Point of View. He was so excited that he decided “to be a philosopher, and go to Harvard and tell this man Quine why he is wrong”. The first two he managed, though for a time he worried that Quine (later a great friend) was more interested by Dennett’s sculpture than his philosophising.

Dennett did contemplate being a sculptor, and would, he said, certainly have studied engineering had his family not been so arts-oriented. Co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University in Massachusetts, in 1993 he joined the Humanoid Robotics Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to construct a robot (Cog) that would be not only intelligent but conscious. The project ended in 2003, and Cog was retired to a museum.

Dennett was Austin B Fletcher professor of philosophy at Tufts, and visiting professor at a host of other universities, including Oxford and the London School of Economics. His memoir, I’ve Been Thinking, was published in 2023.

He and his wife, Susan (nee Bell), whom he married in 1962, lived in North Andover, Massachusetts, and he also hobby farmed in Maine for more than 40 summers, blissfully “tillosophising” on a tractor, sailing his boat Xanthippe, fixing buildings and digging drains. Dennett loved solving puzzles and disinterring the inner workings of machines – above all those of “the miraculous-seeming” mind. “No miracles allowed,” he said.

He is survived by Susan, a daughter, Andrea, and son, Peter, and six grandchildren, and his sisters, Cynthia and Charlotte.

🔔 Daniel Clement Dennett, philosopher, born 28 March 1942; died 19 April 2024

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

#just for books #Daniel Dennett #in memoriam

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300iqprower · 9 months

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thanks for the tl;dr. While I don't agree with all your opinions, I get where you're coming from. Highkey, if you don't mind, what do think of Urobuchi as a writer? I frankly can't stand the man's writings, not only in regards to his "DeCoNsTrUcTiOn" of the magical girl genre with Madoka, but also Fate/Zero and his work on Kamen Rider Gaim.

It's......really hard for me to not blame Urobutcher himself for how Madoka basically killed the entire magical girl genre by causing it to be flooded with edgy tryhard tortureporn.

Like from an objective and analytical standpoint, Madoka is an incredible and meticulously crafted story. ...but subjectively, i fucking hate it, and then on top of that also hate it for what it (again, indirectly) did the genre and really just mainstreem anime in general to a certain, albeit obviously much lesser, degree. I feel like that's an entirely different discussion though, and really it just boils down to a case of "it's good" and "I don't like it" are not mutually exclusive. That's my read anyways.

Fate/Zero i love when watched bit by bit but dont like as a coherent story for much the same subjective reasons I'm personally not a fan of Madoka. For all my negativity I don't actually like nihilistic or cruel stories. Fate/Zero is actually what made me realize that, being the first time I had to as aforementioned go "it's good....but I don't like it." I love pretty much everything that doesn't involve Kerry, which is an issue when the whole story revolves around Kerry.

It's by no means without some serious issues though. Urobutcher wrote Artoria as a completely different character and it causes some serious inconsistencies that had harmful long-term repercussions, the banquet scene is a great setup that as I've discussed before falls completely flat in retrospect because nothing talked about was delivered on, and characters like Abs Hassan and Kariya got beyond wasted, just to name some of my issues with Zero.

But unlike with a LOT of Nasu's writing, actually just FGO writing in general frankly, those flaws don't contradict the ethos of the story. They come across less as contradictions that the writer couldnt be asked to rectify, as much as they do human error and an inability to make everything perfectly coherent and loop back around to the an overarching point. None of the things i've mentioned really detract from the message Fate Zero wants to give. They detract from the quality and consistency of the storytelling, absolutely, but not from the intended purpose of that storytelling. That sort of thing is HUGELY different than something like FGO just making up alternate history to suit it's narrative despite said narrative supposedly being about unity through our shared real world history.

I suppose what it really comes down to is that I don't feel malice or narrow mindedness from Urobutcher's works the way I do from Nasu. Kirei is the best example of this - i'd go so far as to argue Kirei's character didn't have ANY of the depth people now attribute to it before Urobutcher got involved. That's not even a dig at Nasu, that's just how much Urobutcher clearly GETS the kind of character Kirei is [now] meant to be. Same goes for Gilles and Kerry, those are characters that were perfect for someone like Urobutcher to execute (in multiple senses).

Again, Urobutcher is not a flawless writer by any stretch, no one is, and his style is by no means for everyone, because no style SHOULD be universally appealing...but I feel like he very much gives a shit. I feel like whether its all the way back with Fate Zero or his relatively more recent return for Lostbelt 3, Urobutcher gave a shit and did everything with as much purpose as he could. On that ground alone, I'm willing to be a lot more sympathetic to the parts of his writing i don't like, since I can at least convince myself those things (be it intentional choices or simple mistakes) were done in good faith.

#never thought i'd get an ask #writing analysis #gen urobuchi #fgo #fate grand order #fate zero #nasu is a hack #dont play gachas kids

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system-comforts · 6 months

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dont really know where else to put this kind of thing bc its system related but dunno if its relevant here also sorry if the sentences are weird to understand we're bad at communicating

so we know absolutely nothing about the community but we think we're probably posic? in some way? where we see certain objects as being alive and sentient? we know so little about the community thats literally all the info we have but we know we at least see our stuffed animals as slightly sentient

the thing is recently we got an introject who is obsessed with one of our plushies, a pig one that looks like a pet he had in source, and that's been basically the only plushie we've really been carrying around and hugging

we worry a lot about our plushies being sad that they're not loved because we keep moving and have to keep putting them in bags for months on end and then we're not allowed to take them out of storage for long periods of time and don't have space to set them out so we fear that our plushies are feeling neglected and unloved like we're just giving them the same trauma we've recieved

and so this new introject has been giving lots of affection to this specific plushie but it's only ever when he's in front, and he hasn't fronted in a few weeks, so we've basically just completely abandoned this plushie out of the blue

well one of our other headmates panics a lot and will sometimes just grab this plushie for comfort but they keep getting super freaked out that it's like. to this plushie it might not realise we're a system or know what that means so to it it might look like we just randomly stop loving it entirely and then sometimes randomly is just Different and Weird and it's making them want to cry even worse and we don't really know what to do and we get super worried that our other plushies are like. jealous of the attention. or would get jealous if we randomly grabbed one. and they're just spiraling panicking over whether we're traumatizing our plush friends with the way we interact with them and we just kind of dont know what to do because they're a massive comfort for our system as a whole

Hey there friend. I understand your concerns about your plushies and your system. I hope that talking about things here was a bit of weight off your shoulders. I encourage you to write or vent about these things if you find it helpful.

In terms of help, I thought that maybe talking to your plushies about the situation might help alleviate some fears. Do they know you're a system? Perhaps explaining who you are, who different headmates are, and talking about the moves might help. Keeping them in the loop could be good, and I'm sure they'd be willing to listen and understanding. From what you've told me, you care about them a lot, and I'm sure they know how much you care too.

Like with friends, sometimes communication and time spent with them can get difficult when we have a lot going on in our lives. Good friends understand things like that happen. Wishing you the best.

-mod pluto

#mod pluto #ask #headmates #plushies

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easily-distracted-devblog · 8 days

Text

Victory Galactic Post Mortem

I'm quite proud of the final version of the game our team put together. However this version of the game is still not without flaw. Playtesting revealed that one of the largest issues our game had was learnability. As Fullerton writes in Game Design Workshop Page 80 "Rules need to be clear to players or in the case of digital games that adjudicate for players, they need to be intuitively grasped so that the game seems fair and responsive in given situations" I feel that a great number of our games core issues could have been fixed if we had stuck closer to this advice. While the basic movement was picked up fairly quickly by play testers some of the more idiosyncratic mechanics such as the launcher, foam and gravity wells were more difficult to communicate. If development where to continue one of the most urgent problems to fix would be the tutorial level. Our design ethos towards this level was to simply let the players interact with the mechanics and figure them out on their own. It may have been better to have explained the mechanics to the player in greater detail in the tutorial level.

Another of our more glaring issues would be the time thresholds required to unlock the skin rewards. As the time thresholds were chosen based on our own highly experienced playthrough of the game play testers were often not able to complete the levels fast enough to unlock the skins. This may have been exacerbated by the tutorial issues but overall it would be best if the time thresholds matched a beginners skill level. Additionally it may have been better to communicate that the player needed to complete the levels hastily in order to unlock the rewards as there was no explicit statement that this was the objective of the secondary gameplay loop. While I am happy with the majority of the visual design I feel that certain UI components and sprites could have benefitted from a redesign. I tried to keep everything to a certain visual style to emphasize the games elements as part of a cohesive whole however there where certain components that were kept as placeholders due to time constraints. Additionally some of the more abstract science-fiction concepts that were decided on as mechanics were quite difficult to create intuitive visual designs for. The mechanics that were the most difficult to communicate just through visuals were the Elastic Foam and the launcher.

The foam relied on soft curves in an attempt to indicate that it was not a hazard. However this did not seem to translate during testing. If production were to continue it may be beneficial to alter the design to something more identify able such as some springs, or perhaps animate and apply sound design that made it seem non-threatening. The launcher also had some difficulties not being read as a hazard. Perhaps due to its pointed and angular design. Other play testers believed that the launcher only fired in the direction it was pointing. In the future it may be beneficial to adopt a less abstract design. Overall I am still pleased with the efforts of my team and what we have spent the last several weeks creating together.

References: Fullerton, T. (2018). Game Design Workshop : A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games. Boca Raton: CRC Press LLC.

#post mortem #game development #gamedev

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cssnder · 12 days

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Happy STS! Are any of your characters based on people you know/knew/met irl (whether loosely or specifically)?

warning: long rambling and probably a bit senseless because I can't think today.

Hello, you!

Real life is the greatest source of inspiration. I believe that to write characters that feel real, one must draw from real life. I suppose it is not surprising if I tell you that that all my characters are inspired by real-life people: me, my family, my friends, the toddlers I babysit, the people I met online, and even complete strangers that I have observed whenever I'm out. Writing good characters, characters that'll remain with the reader long after they finished their reading, demands a keen eye, an openness, and a certain objectivity.

To take my main novel for example, a lot of Oliver's thoughts, fears, and memories are directly taken from my diaries from a certain time in my life. His life at the beginning of the novel — in a small village, living with his parents who barely seem to care about him, and an overwhelming desire to leave this place and experience something new in a way only Emma Bovary could understand —, that too is inspired by my own life. And it doesn't necessarily stop to characters. Oliver wants to flee his house every time he looks out the window in his kitchen. Why? Because from there, he can see the church from the village he lives in and he fears he'll die before he ever got to leave this place, and will be buried in the church's cemetery. I suppose you won't be too surprised if I were to tell you that from my kitchen we can indeed see the Church of the village I live in, standing tall and menacing like a bad omen. He loves modernist poetry, I do too. At some point in the story, he gets gastritis from stress. I had to go through this ordeal last year too lmao. Of course, he's not the only one to have bits and pieces of me.

Wilhelm does too, although his traits are mine but exaggerated. His moral nihilism, his tendency to be quiet, his apathy, his rarefied talent for secrecy. But also, the way he learns languages to pass the time and, as a result, became a polyglot. He cannot hear too well from his left ear — I had too many otitis as a child and it damaged mine too. He fears reincarnation — this, I did too at some point. The idea of my soul just hopping into another body every time I died, even if I were to kill myself, and being unable to stop this loop didn't sit with me very well.

I'd say most of my characters have bits and pieces from me, but they do so in varying degrees. Oliver and Wilhelm are, quite obviously, the ones with the highest quantity while the other characters have some but it's more like added details, you know. After all, I'm the one to write them and, I suppose, it simply slips out. Sometimes, when I enter a room, I tend to open the door by lazily giving it a hit with my shoulder. This is something I didn't know I did until my sister pointed it out. This, for example I gave it to James. In our house, we can always hear music coming from my room, including a lot of classic records, that too, I gave James. He doesn't like being talked to in the morning, neither do I. But a lot comes from other people I've known throughout my life. The way James likes to read a certain genre of books, generally vintage sci-fi/horror: Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank; Swan Song by Robert McCammon — this one, James actually buys it during the story —; Strange Eons by Robert Bloch; The Incredible Melting Man by Phil Smith; Horror House by J. N Williamson; The Cats by Nick Sharma; but also books by P.G Wodehouse sometimes, too. I knew a guy like that who would read nothing else but those books. The way James can be easily irritable. This comes from my father. His love for animals, — petting every cat he meets and even discussing with birds — it comes from my brother. The way he sits, holds his cigarette, and stands — it all comes from different people's I've observed whether in my circle or outside while I was grocery shopping or going out somewhere. And this is generally the case for most of my characters, really. They're a carefully crafted mix of all those people that crossed my path. You could be smoking a cigarette in front of me right now and I'd be observing the way you hold it, what brand you smoke, the way the smoke moves around you, the way you move, what you say and how you say it — I'd be taking notes in my mind and giving it to a character.

Now, I rarely have a character that's based entirely on one person only for that book. But it does happen. Oliver's parents are strictly based on my own. Donna, who was supposed to be a minor character but finally ended up being more important than I had originally planned, was, in a high degree, based on my best friend the same degree that Oliver was mostly based on me. Her height, her tooth gap, the sound of her voice, the way she speaks, her red hair, her obsession with movies but also the way she's easily scared of horror ones, her zine that she discreetly distributes to other students... All those things are based on my best friend.

I am just enumerating a few details here and there but there are so many. However, it'd be far too long if I were to keep going and go over all my other characters. And this post is already getting too long. So, I am going to leave you with this:

I think I've already said it on my blog but I strongly recommend writers to journal a lot. You never know when a certain thought can be thought by one of your characters later on. I record everything in there, all in past tense, as if it were a novel — conversations I had; taking note of the way people talk, or move; places; weird dreams I had; thoughts; feelings; ideas; even the weather, for it exercises my description skills. Anything and everything really. It's an excellent exercise but also, I found, an excellent place to put observations and details that will help shapes future characters et hoc genus omne.

#once my book is published tho im deleting this post #I'll be pulling a Wilhelm #no way the public knows so much is about me #Asks #A Writer's Diary

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darsynia · 1 year

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Diminished Seventh (ch 3)

(Stephen Strange/OC, 'mistrust to lovers,' Animate Objects series)

art found here: duttaayon14008 | gif by @marveledits

Length: 3,551

Animate Objects | Previous Chapter | Next Chapter

I am quite new, and a wee bit shy about tags and asks, but please feel free to send them anyway! Tags: @starryeyes2000, @raith-way, @arrthurpendragon, @sobeautifullyobsessed

A 'diminished seventh' chord creates tension that begs to be resolved.

Excerpt:

“Have you made any progress in differentiating the deaths?” Wong asked without preamble.

Stephen shook his head. “No, and I don’t see that there’s a path, there. You know you’ve died too many times when you lose track of how many times it was impalement over incineration.”

He stripped off his outer clothing, down to a simple black pair of trousers and a cream-colored tunic with no sleeves. The torch he’d lit upstairs from one of their most ancient relics crackled as he lit the other three and set the fourth into its recess. The hour he’d spent meditating beforehand had been restless in a way it usually was not, so Stephen anticipated this to be a rough session.

“Are you ready?” he asked Wong.

“Am I ever?” came the usual reply.

“One of these nights you’re going to change it up. You’ll say ‘never,’ and that’ll be the night I find the thing I’m looking for.”

“May it pass from your lips to your mind’s eye.”

Chapter Three

“Once again I have to ask you if you know what you’re doing?”

Stephen was still watching Amy marching away from him. Maybe if he pretended not to hear--

“If you won’t listen to me, I won’t help you.”

He wheeled around, jaw clenching. The expression on Wong’s face was sympathetic rather than angry, and that didn’t bode well. “Define ‘won’t help,’” Stephen gritted out.

“I was happy to come once a week and help you wrestle with the visions, Stephen. I’m certain you would have continued searching through them by yourself, if I hadn’t. But I don’t think you realize that you incurred more than just a mystical debt, in your battle with Dormammu.”

“Yes, yes. Psychological damage, which I’m dealing with as best I can,” he dismissed. “What the hell does that have to do with--”

Wong stepped closer and lowered his voice. “Every minute you spent in that loop took you chronologically farther from safety, farther from the people and places you loved. Time can heal, but it also separates.” He threw a look over his shoulder in Amy’s direction, and Stephen felt a roiling anxiety froth up in his gut. “I fear you have chosen to seek truth in your time loop torture for the same reason you’ve taken up the mystery of this woman.”

“I don’t have to stand here and listen to this bullshit,” Stephen snapped, pushing past Wong on his way to opening the door and getting out of there.

“Are you looking for answers or excitement, Stephen?”

Wong’s accusation rang out, and he stopped still, teeth grinding. Stephen could feel his pulse speeding up, commensurate with his anger. He spun on his heel and walked back toward his friend and colleague. His voice had always been one of his most powerful weapons, and Stephen employed it now, dropping his tone, stirring in a pinch of threat, a scoop of innuendo, but even he could hear the hefty serving of defensiveness when he was finally standing in front of Wong.

“Tell me exactly what you think my problem is. Don’t dance around it.”

“I’m not prevaricating at all. If you think so, you’re the one dancing.”

It was calculated, this risk. Kamar Taj’s location wasn’t a secret to anyone who was looking, and it was populated with powerful, strong-willed people who would like nothing better than to protect it. Still, Stephen’s head was filled with the past, various chunks of it-- undoubtedly a remnant of his weekly battles to remember. Wong’s accusation about excitement was off-base, but Stephen was chasing something.

“I stand by what I said,” Amy told him. It was the first time she’d spoken in a full five minutes; their portal had been facing the mountains, and after stepping out, she’d simply walked as close as she could get, pressed herself up against the wall of the courtyard, and stared. She was clearly in awe, but her body language told him she was also nervous. “You don’t make any sense.”

“Some would take that as a compliment.”

She turned her head and regarded him. “You think I’m an enemy and still bring me here of all places? The spiritual heart of your--” Amy struggled for words, then looked back over at the far mountains. “Stephen, what on Earth happened that you’re so fearful and trusting, all at once?”

This woman seemed determined to get under his skin. She’d been immediately comfortable with using his name, had somehow touched him multiple times despite their having only just met. Through his life, he’d gone from being a brilliant but driven student to a brilliant but driven surgeon, and now he was Sorcerer Supreme. In every role, he’d been given deference, distance.

Amy didn’t bother with those things.

She was looking at him expectantly, and Stephen thought of Kaecilius, then of himself, newly trained and thrust into a position to fight for his life and the safety of the sanctum. “I’m not fearful, I’m guarded, and for good reason. Those allowed into our most sacred spaces are the ones with the most power to do damage. That’s as true here as it is as a metaphor.” He took in a breath, setting loose his gathered thoughts about that ordeal in a long, measured sigh. “I brought you here in case you had been here before. In case someone recognized you.”

“That helps, actually,” she said, her crooked smile lifting more on the right. “It’s the suspicious ‘you’ I recognize.”

Stephen indicated that they should start toward the center of the courtyard. As they walked, he noticed a group of students practicing across from them. It was too far to hear the instructor’s words, but the sharp sound of her staff striking the ground made the front row bow in apology.

“We’re distracting them!” Amy said in dismay, starting to angle away.

“Maintaining focus is part of their task,” he said. He felt a drag on the Cloak and looked over to see that his relic had caught her arm to prevent her from moving away. The look on her face was fond but uncomfortable as she slowed, deciding what to do. “I wanted you to watch them for a few moments.”

“Can we do that in a way that doesn’t put us right in their line of sight?”

He thought about that for a moment, then inclined his head. With a swift, practiced gesture, Stephen opened a portal, indicating for her to precede him through it.

“What kind of life have you led where you expect people to trust you that much?” she asked him, incredulous. “For that first one I could see the mountains and a safe place to stand. That just shows the sky!”

Stephen’s response was to add a gesture, causing the portal to sweep toward and over them, taking them to his chosen destination. It was either that or grab her hand and yank her along with him, and he suspected he would have enjoyed that too much.

“Well, you certainly don’t do anything in halves,” Amy said, crossing her arms.

The place he’d chosen was a roof-top alcove that overlooked the courtyard, an observation space he’d often used himself, for this exact purpose. He appreciated that she took stock of her surroundings as a matter of course, turning in a careful circle, just as she’d done when he’d pulled them into the Mirror Dimension in the basement. It was a good habit, and Stephen chastised himself for seeing her more as a potential trainee than someone to be wary of.

“I know I’ve only been here for ten minutes, but-- have you ever seen one of those warning signs that are meant to scare people into being careful? ‘Not only will this kill you, but it will hurt the entire time you’re dying,’” Amy quoted. Stephen’s brows furrowed, and she nodded toward Kamar Taj, laid out in front of them. “It really feels like this place is the spiritual opposite of that.”

He breathed the compliment in before he could stop himself, sending its sweetness coursing through his bloodstream until the words suffused his whole body. The “Thank you,” he offered felt inadequate. “Sounds like experience talking.”

“Electrical substation, or something like that,” she told him. “It was close to the flood zone after a hurricane, and we had to send someone to guard it, so that no one proved the sign right just to get a picture.” Amy shook her head. “This is another level of sightseeing, here.”

“Well, I didn’t bring you for the mountains or the architecture. I brought you to observe them,” Stephen said, indicating the training students.

She looked confused, but obediently (for once) stood quietly watching for a few minutes before saying, “Is it that there are many more students than just me? People who will fight back if I am the villain you seem to hope I am?”

He ignored her jibe and said, “Not quite. May I cast something to amplify your hearing so you can catch the instruction?”

“How long will it last?” she asked, adding, “I took public transit to your sanctum, Stephen. I do not want to hear everyone’s conversations on my way back.”

He liked the way she said his name. He didn’t want to like the way she said his name.

“Twenty minutes, usually.” Stephen lifted a hand, pulled on his connection, and waited for her nodding response before casting.

“Oh my,” Amy said immediately. “That has to be tuned to voices or I’m certain I’d hear your heartbeat!”

“Just listen” he instructed, tamping back the parts of him that were greedy to explore the charming ways she reacted to things.

Stephen didn’t need to enhance his own hearing. He knew the group and liked and trusted their instructor, so he watched as Master Wolfe moved from student to student, suggesting something here, chastising there. Karl Mordo’s loss was a loss for all of Kamar Taj, for all that he’d rarely spent time with large groups like this by the time of Stephen’s arrival. He had been the one the Adepts hoped to spar with, someone who was complimentary but never condescended to lose.

Amy had asked Stephen what he was afraid of, but how could he explain that Kamar Taj had gone through one betrayal, and might soon suffer another? ‘The bill comes due,’ Mordo had said, after Dormammu. It wasn’t until the nightmares had started just a week later that he connected his former friend and colleague’s defection with the glimpses of a horrible future, seen in flashes between dying repeatedly in the time loop. The next search would be that night, brought forward a day thanks to Wong’s visit.

Perhaps Wong was right. Maybe Stephen was looking for a distraction, a mystery wrapped in defiance and the light scent of vintage perfume to balance out the experience of reliving those moments.

“Not everyone can conjure, yet!” Amy realized aloud.

“Exactly,” he said, pleased that she’d figured out what he’d wanted her to notice. “That was me, once. I didn’t handle it very well.” Her laugh was a welcome sound. “It took a lot of time and a lot of reading before I made the right connection.”

Her hand landed on his forearm, squeezing. “Reading?” Amy asked, obviously excited.

Wong wasn’t the permanent librarian anymore, but he’d been there when Stephen and Amy arrived, meaning that Stephen could take care of a few things without needing to take her along with him.

He came back in an hour to find that she had a stack of books and a notebook, and was already taking diligent notes.

“You can’t take those home with you, you know,” he said by way of greeting.

She scrunched her nose at him. “I know that. Wong says you can take them to the sanctum though, and if I have to show up every day to baptize Spike, I might as well have something to do.”

“You’ll be training during that time.”

“So you’re planning to design your entire schedule around every time I can come by?” Amy’s lifted eyebrows spoke volumes.

“I most certainly do not! You’ll need to--”

“Yeah, the thing is, it’s not my interdimensional sanctum of protection that’s at stake if I don’t pop by to pet an umbrella, so I don’t think so.”

Behind them, Wong cleared his throat. “This is still a library, so I’ll ask you two to keep it down.”

“Are you--” Stephen started in full voice, but someone hidden in the chained books across the room made a loud shushing noise. Amy pulled a book up in front of her face to hide it, but her shoulders were shaking with laughter. More quietly, he said, “Promise to leave your notes at the sanctum too, and I’ll consider it.”

“Yes, Master,” Amy murmured.

“All right. Time to go!” he said, picking up the stack of books beside her and holding a hand out for the one she was holding. If he kept moving and making noise, he could excise that tone of her voice from his mind, so he wouldn’t relive it later.

“Shhhhh!” someone behind them hissed.

Stephen reluctantly set her up in a small side-room off of the smaller sanctum library. It had a large desk, a lamp, and not much else. That would let her leave the books in a state of respectful disarray and not worry they’d be tidied up when she wasn’t there.

Time was nearing to lunch, and he could sense that she wanted to get going. Every so often she would look around, as though some obligation was pressing for her attention. He offered to show her the path from her temporary office to the front door, telling himself it was to allow her to reveal a desire to stick around to do more spying-- but the truth was, his suspicion had faded greatly over the course of the day.

That meant it was past time for her to leave, not that he was actually learning to trust her, Stephen decided.

On the stairs, she paused, looking back over her shoulder as if expecting Kamar Taj to be there. “Is-- Pardon me, but are all the people who seek out your Himalayan sanctuary broken in some way?”

Stephen had fully intended to continue down without her, but he halted, turning to look up at her. “Excuse me?” The set of her jaw was vulnerable, and her eyes were apologetic, even in the face of his strong response.

“I overheard--” Amy pulled in a breath and let it out slowly. He’d seen her do it before, both done to calm herself down, maybe to prevent an emotional reaction. “You implied you sought Kamar Taj after you couldn’t be a surgeon anymore. In the library while you were gone, I met Master Hamir and we talked a little while.” She didn’t mention the other man’s amputation, but her implication was evident. “Before that, outside, I overheard a conversation between three people, all speaking of the healing they had been seeking when they came to Kamar Taj.” She bit her lip, then smiled, as though she’d thought of something to soften her suppositions. “I wouldn’t dream of asking Wong--”

“All right, I get it,” he interrupted. “What’s the purpose of this?”

She looked away, toward where he knew there was a staircase to the basement. “Can a relic know that I’m broken?”

His first instinct was compassion, but he immediately had the thought that she’d neatly set him up to feel that way, had used her skills as a manipulator to drive him to trust her, only to reveal that trust in a moment like this one.

He took no careful, deep breaths.

“You’re crafty, I’ll give you that,” Stephen said, mounting the stairs toward her. “Telling the leader of a powerful group of warrior mages that he’s broken isn’t going to ingratiate yourself to him. It just looks like you’re parroting the language of your own master.”

Infuriatingly, she didn’t look hurt-- and he was forced to remember her saying she’d worked in crisis management, had been an on-site mediator. Thousands of hurt people spewing retaliatory anger had probably inured her to his.

“My ‘master’ is grief, Stephen Strange. It’s more powerful than you.”

With that, she walked down the stairs, her head held high. He stood still, stunned, until her hand tugged at the door handle and found it locked. Only then did she drop her head in a sad sort of gesture of defeat.

He could cast a portal to unlock the door without having to move his feet at all. That wouldn’t be respectful, though. Her words resonated, and even if she was sent by Mordo, even if the thing he’d hated most about being a surgeon had been the potential grief in the eyes of his patients’ families, he couldn’t bring himself to dismiss her. Stephen started down.

When he reached her, though, she did the most unexpected thing.

“How about we start over? I assume there’s a wealth of information, perhaps even in that library at Kamar Taj, about how a mistrustful instructor inhibits the potential of their students,” Amy said softly, when he reached her. She’d been speaking while still facing the door, but now she turned, a clinically warm smile on her face. “Amy Cairn, it’s nice to meet you,” she said, offering a handshake.

She was right, but on top of that, Stephen couldn’t help but notice that his suspicion had done nothing to constrain her. If she were truly a tool of Baron Karl Mordo, sent either to ascertain Stephen’s arrogance or scout the sanctum, he could hardly learn more by maintaining his animosity.

He took her hand, shaking firmly. “Doctor Stephen Strange. Do you plan on visiting us again tomorrow?” Her answering squeeze was relief-driven, he could see.

“Yes, but it won’t be until late in the evening, I’m afraid. We have much to catch up on at work, with the building closed today.”

“I’ll see you then,” he said, releasing her hand and unlocking the door. It was lucky that his vision-seeking had been moved to this evening.

“Until then,” she agreed, and left.

Stephen had to remind himself to shut the door. After preparing himself a sandwich on autopilot, he was halfway through eating it when it struck him why his surroundings felt so strange: it was the first time he’d eaten in the dining room for lunch since the influx of odd visitors. He grabbed his plate and made his way to the surveillance closet.

Wong was there already, of course.

“You seemed distracted,” Wong said, as if in explanation.

Stephen cleared his throat. “Anything to report?”

“No. There were no incidents along the wards overnight, either, which I’m sure you were going to look into at some point today.”

“Well excuse me for trying to figure her out! I suppose it would be easier to just let the woman bring us all to ruin than prevent it in any way,” he snapped back. It was as if Wong saw no value in what he’d done all day.

“Is that what you were doing? Preventing ruin?”

“Maybe lay off of whatever brand of tea you had this morning. It clearly doesn’t agree with you.”

He was most of the way down the hall when Wong’s retort made it to his ears.

“There is such a thing as too agreeable!”

For all their petty bickering at various points of the day, when the time struck 10:30, Wong showed up in the basement room prepared to help, as always.

“Have you made any progress in differentiating the deaths?” he asked without preamble.

Stephen shook his head. “No, and I don’t see that there’s a path, there. You know you’ve died too many times when you lose track of how many times it was impalement over incineration.”

“Are you ready?” he asked Wong.

“Am I ever?” came the usual reply.

“One of these nights you’re going to change it up. You’ll say ‘never,’ and that’ll be the night I find the thing I’m looking for.”

“May it pass from your lips to your mind’s eye.”

Wong adjusted his stance, mystical energy already sparking between his fingers. Stephen was always insensate during the most intense parts of these memory encounters, and as such he never knew what it was that Wong was so intently prepared for-- but he knew it was fearful.

He sank to his knees in the very center of the recessed circle, held his arms out to his sides with his palms up, and tipped his head back. With a single word, he connected to the source of dimensional power, pulling it inward until he could hardly bear the pressure, and then releasing it straight into the part of his mind that held the memories of his deaths before Dormammu.

There was no telling them apart, as he’d said-- but that meant there was also no mechanism to differentiate the times he’d spoken the phrase etched into the bones of his consciousness and simply died, with no flash of prescience, no glimpse of the future, beforehand.

Dormammu, I’m here to bargain.

This was one of those times. Stephen died, feeling the agony of it, the pain in his chest glowing golden as Wong cast the spell to pull him out.

“Anything?”

“No. Again,” Stephen coughed. It always felt so real. When he’d finally won that war of awful attrition, he’d promised himself that he wouldn’t have to go through it again. Mordo would have laughed, if he knew. He’d say, How does it feel to be wrong?

“Ready?” Wong was the one who asked this time, the light forming again at his fingertips.

“Ready. Ama-gi,” Stephen intoned, drawing power anew for another dive into the depths of his worst despair.

Next chapter...

#stephen strange #stephen strange fanfiction #stephen strange x oc #doctor strange #doctor strange fanfiction #doctor strange x oc #doctor strange x original character #mcu #mcu fanfiction #mcu fanfic #marvel #marvel fanfic #stephen strange imagine #series: animate objects #ocfairygodmother #fyeahsuperverseocs

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kirinda-ondo · 2 years

Note

I wanna ask the Fruit Loops! 🗣️🤡🐒💝🎲

O shit all of them?? Hella

Bragi

Aneas

Tomor

🗣️ - How do they handle public speaking?

"A simple task, really! And fun! As if I could pass up the opportunity to have an audience!"

PLEASE let Bragi speak publicly, that means he has an AUDIENCE that is PAYING ATTENTION TO HIM. He would THRIVE.

"U-Um... no. N-No thank you."

Aneas would simply pass away if asked to do any public speaking. Like you might be able to begrudgingly convince him if he can hide in the safety of his sleeves while he does it but even then he would probably be struggling

"Sure! Ain't no big thing! Just... not right now--"

Tomor is usually pretty unbothered so you'd think he'd be fine with a large audience, but a stage comedian he is not. He can kind of make a convincing sounding delivery, but his legs are totally shaking the whole time.

🤡 - What’s something dumb they’re embarrassed about?

"A-As if I'd tell you!"

Bragi once got stuck in a playground tunnel and freaked out so bad he passed out and his friend Maraschi had to call emergency services to remove him and even though he swore her to secrecy she keeps TELLING PEOPLE and they keep LAUGHING AT HIM--

"Mmm... W-Where do I even begin..."

Aneas is honestly embarrassed about his entire existence tbh. Especially his height. He knows everybody loves him being baby-sized but he doesn't WANT to be baby-sized, he wants to be taken SERIOUSLY and reach IMPORTANT SHELVES or HIS WIFE'S FACE without using a step-stool!

"I ain't embarrassed about nothin'! Not when I can just look back and laugh!"

Tomor is not easily embarrassed, but if you were to even remotely imply he was into a certain horrible fish girl he would probably deny it just a little too hard and then have to go and re-evaluate some things and spiral a bit because he doesn't even realize it yet--

🐒 - What’s their favorite animal?

"No."

If you put Bragi within 15 feet of any animal he WILL scream and probably die. That being said, he does begrudgingly accept that the starfish is objectively the best animal because by Bragi logic, you get stars when you're good, so to be already born star-shaped means they must be perfect.

"Umm... B-Birds are nice!"

Aneas doesn't want any animals of his own because A) he's afraid he would accidentally kill them, and B) He's worried they would harm his plants. He wouldn't mind some bird-themed knick-knacks tho.

"Spiders are pretty fun, I guess. The reactions to 'em are always pretty funny, anyway--"

Tomor does genuinely think they're neat tho. He doesn't own one, but he knows a lot of spider facts

💝 - What gestures do they really appreciate? How do you get on their good side?

"Getting on my good side isn't all that hard to do, so long as you're nice to me and give me presents~"

Bragi is incredibly attention hungry, so he will gladly accept any and every kind gesture you are willing to give. That said, if you wanna like actually really move him, do or give him something that he's not expecting. He will cry and cherish it forever.

"Y-You don't have to do anything for me... J-Just be nice to Coulie, th-that's all I want."

Aneas doesn't really expect anyone to do anything nice for him ever, so anytime someone does, it's honestly really appreciated, even if it's some grand thing that makes him feel really awkward and uncomfortable. Really all you have to do is be nice, respect his wife, and appreciate his plants.

"I don't need favors, and I don't like havin' a lot of stuff. And I especially don't like feelin' like I owe nobody nothin'. People say they don't tally that kinda thing, but they all secretly do."

The best thing to give Tomor is just your time and hang out, and most importantly, be at least a little fun lmao

🎲 - Pick a random question to answer from this list

O shit uhhh we'll go with:

🤔 - What’s something they’ll never understand?

"I don't understand the fuss about romance! It's stupid and confusing and it takes up too much time that could be better spent on more important things!"

Sometimes Bragi does kind of wonder if he's missing out on something, but then he thinks about it a little more and is like "nah"

"I-I don't understand technology... Th-There's either too many buttons, o-or no buttons at all, a-and I don't get it at all..."

Inside of Aneas is a little old lady and she doesn't know what a Google is, let alone how to use it! Or the toaster for that matter! Thankfully, he doesn't need Google because his wife Coulie knows everything (sincere) (affectionate)

"What's the big deal about mortals? It's always, 'save 'em all!' or 'kill em all!' What's it matter? Sure, they're fun sometimes, but they're just gonna die in a couple decades, so like, who cares?"

Tomor just sees mortals as short-lived novelties, little more than pets or entertainment. This will absolutely not cause any friction in his life whatsoever--

#kateh's oc tag #bragi #aneas #tomor #thank you for indulging me uwu

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playersleft · 2 years

Text

It’s not real.

The only trace of sense that remains is clawing into her skull, reminding on loop: It’s not real. It’s not real. It’s not real.

Still conscious, still detecting the shifts: Rain. Honey. Water the grass. The animals need to eat. I need to eat. 27′s hum sounds a certain way before saying my number. 26 is a little upset at me... but worried, too? They’re both dorks. They’re putting something on the roof.

Conscious, aware, the words floating in her mind echo the truth of things happening around her, as well as the most prevalent truth: It’s not real. This is a game.

Echoes are all her mind can do.

It was unexpected; Every other instance of this game had been fine, more or less. Hiccups on occasion, but overall, it was fun! With some of her dear friends, they were set on a raft in the middle of the ocean, and told to make the most of it. For the most part, she found her peace in organizing, expanding, making their raft feel like home. 26 and 27 seemed to have fun a bit more on the external side-- Exploring the islands, finding puzzles, unlocking codes to the next, learning every new thing there is. She tended to keep to her favorites, but it’s fun to listen, and sometimes it’s fun to tag along! That’s normally how it went.

It’s just a game. It’s just a game, like any other.

But the imagery took her by surprise... Why? She likes animals enough, that’s a given fact-- one that even tends to be hailed to her more than her heart sided with. Still, she had no issue calling out how brainless these ones were; reciting that they were just bundles of code and color, she had no issue killing them on occasion either. It’s just a game-- But even if it weren’t, she could turn her eyes away enough. Her affections... are usually played up.

So why? The angry eyes of something dog-like, glaring at her from a dark cage-- The imagery is so overdone, and so png. It was drawn, and slapped onto a square of black. Who cares? Why did it... make her sad? Why couldn’t she go fight them?

‘What’s the point of this?’ She kept thinking-- ‘They didn’t do anything wrong, it’s that guy’. But it’s all fake anyway. And her friends could’ve used more help! It’s a game, this is an objective, but it felt like her mind was already slipping to somewhere else. Somewhere... back-- But what on earth could it have reminded her of? Should she even try to place it? It doesn’t matter, so...

... It’s embarrassing, for her mind to leave her body this way. The awareness that she was being looked at, that they wanted to know, Why didn’t you help? But even if she had the words to explain, her voice wasn’t connected to anything, Concerned, 27 opened his arms to her, and her heart melted-- But if she went to him, who would have received it? ... Not her, that’s all she knew. There wasn’t a presence in this body.

Get the honey. Water the grass. Feed yourself. 26 is upset... 27′s already noticed. This is a game.

This is a game. It’s with that mindset that she grabbed her spear and went forward again. It’s a game, there’s an objective, they could use help, and I wanna know where the story goes. It’s with that mindset that she went forward again.

Stabbing the creatures, ignoring the eyes that looked to her-- Focus on the enemy, the story, the well-being of her friends. Like always. It wasn’t a difficult thing to do. It wasn’t difficult at all, and her mind even began to find footing in her body once aga-

“Mom..-”

Suddenly, a face walked by. An NPC. A scrappily made 3d model. The same as every other in this game, it was barely relevant to the story, and had only a single line of stock dialogue.

It’s fake. It’s fake. It’s a game. It’s a game. There’s supplies here. There’s decorations. There’s story. There’s design. This is cool. This is cool.

“M-Mom-! Wait!”

As it walked away, idly following a base map laid out by a few devs, something in her heart dropped. It’s fake. It’s a game. It’s not real. 26 spoke, now 27. Where did they run off to? Oh-- No, 27′s right there. He’s looking at you. He knows something’s up. He’s here. He’s not real.

“Momma... You’re so beautiful...”

As it sat on the bench, the sunlight, a cheeky golden color filter, framed her face perfectly.

It’s fake. It’s so fake. It’s not real. It’s not real. There’s no texture. The colors suck. It’s such a crappy 3d model. It’s only the skin and hair that’s similar at all. You’d rarely even dress like that. These eyes are so em-- so full... So warm.... Your cheeks are beautiful.. I can see every pore, every bend of the light Every eyelash, every hair, your eyes, how you look at me, Momma, you’re here--

.... 27′s looking at you. 26 found something. Game... ... Mom-

Play cool. It’s fake. Walk away. Look for those supplies they talked about. See what’s around.

They’re going back to the raft, and she should too, it’s right over there.

But I.... But-- bBut I>>..!

[ BUt IA ncAN’t L33aVE HE_rRR-! ]

it’sf a. .eak it’s fak-e it’ snot rela auit’s no it’s fake

she3--s not hEEre sh7s n;t her ehas its fak.ee

[ I CAN’T LE3AV-- HER NO8W-!?

AFTER EV8;;RYTH1iiiiii.nG !.! ]

the’yrea getin0g on the ra.fffft htey want tO2 go you shou17d go

should go

[ BUT Sh$$$4′s RIGHT HE.>>>>>>>>>>009,R ]

go should. go.

food low water low - == should go.

the edges of the screen [ BLUR ] and.cc rgb filter shift =on c vignette =on [dying] TICKING csound fx =on CAMERA SW4AY =on

return to raft to proceed playing [ easy mode respawn active, no inventory lost ]

She’s riight. here I can’t l3eav66 h.r. I don’t wan

-------- I’ll never [ see ] he--r ag .again. -----

“ Momma...! “

[ if I stay, until the last possible second-- ]

...

It’s not real.

...

I should announce myself. An animal clipping through the wall. This game is so...

“She’s back on the boat.”

...

I’m sorry. That was embarrassing.

#P.32 #Thirty Second Entry Point

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victorluvsalice · 2 years

Text

Happy Birthday Nebby!

@nebbychan, as per your suggestion, here is something featuring Victor making an unusual new friend in a variation of the Forgotten Vows Verse which features a certain black cauldron in its history. . .

Alice clasped her hands before her. “All right. Let me get this straight. You were roaming the East End, looking for me, when you found your way down a certain alley blocked by a garbage heap.”

“Yes,” Victor confirmed, twisting his tie between his hands.

“For some reason, rather than just go in a different direction, you decided instead to climb over the heap.”

“I’d spotted Splatter in the area earlier and I didn’t want to start a fight.”

“Ah, fair enough. But during your attempt to navigate the garbage, you ended up cutting yourself on something, tripped as a result, and grabbed this old iron cauldron to steady yourself. Leading to your blood dripping into it.”

“That – is essentially what happened, yes.”

“And that’s when the cauldron lit up with mystical fire, and this person–” Alice nodded to the rather large, practically skull-headed man with glowing red eyes and horns standing beside them “–crawled out of it.”

“I was surprised too.”

“He then proceeded to thank you for freeing him from his torment, and pledged his allegiance to you.”

“Given he had just spared me from an eternity of imprisonment in a realm of pure evil and rage, being tortured by those I had hoped to harness for my own ends, I felt it only fitting to do so,” the man said, voice rumbling like thunder.

“I’m not questioning why you did it,” Alice said, holding up a hand. “I’m just – more surprised you didn’t bolt on instinct right then, Victor.”

“I almost did,” Victor admitted, biting his lip. “But I tried to run from Emily, and I ended up in the Land of the Dead anyway. . .besides, I really wanted to know what was going on, and why I suddenly had a horned, rotting corpse at my feet swearing fealty.”

“I suppose I would too. So he tells you his story, which is that he is the ‘Horned King’ of legend, who once tried to use that very cauldron to take over the world with an army of undead monsters animated by pure hatred for the living.” She shot the Horned King a look. “Which you are not planning to do again, right?”

“I have had many centuries to reflect on how badly that went,” the Horned King replied, grimacing despite not having much of a face to do so. “Many painful, awful centuries. Yes, I admit, I once wished to be a god among men. But now – I just want to live among them.”

“Good to know. So yes, this King–”

“I choose to go by ‘Hoki’ now.”

“All right then, Hoki then thanks you again and says you must be a very powerful sorcerer indeed to free him from the depths of the cauldron.”

“He is a powerful sorcerer,” Hoki protested. “I just assumed he was trained.”

“Um – to be f-fair, improving my magical abilities was the last thing on my mind when I ended up in the Land of the Dead,” Victor said, twisting up his tie some more. “Or here in Whitechapel, come to think of it.”

Hoki shook his head. “Hmph. This is why I decided that part of my service to you must be teaching you to master your magic. Yes, you are only committing minor acts of necromancy right now, on corpses already primed to rise, but – well. Uncontrolled power will cause you untold ills.”

“Oh, I’m not objecting to magic lessons!” Victor cried, waving his hands. “I promise you that! I’m just saying, it was never a priority before.”

“Right – so that’s about the time that you explained that Hoki’s – summoning, I guess – was an accident, and what you were doing in the alley? Houndsditch and Bumby and trying to find me?”

“Yes, exactly,” Victor said, clapping his hands together. “And that’s when he said he could easily summon you here and–” He shrugged. “Here you are.”

“Here I am,” Alice agreed. “Whisked away from the nightmarish realm of Queensland to your side.” She looped her arm through his. “Which I am not angry about in the slightest, trust me. I just – I’m still getting it all straight in my head.”

Victor chuckled. “That’s fine – I’m still getting it all straight in mine.” He touched her shoulder. “But – are you all right? I’ve been so worried ever since you wandered off. . .”

Alice stared at her shoes. “I’ve – been better. I’ve been wandering through Wonderland, killing my way through the brutal infection left by the Infernal Train, and I’ve – had some absolutely terrible revelations.” She worried her lower lip with her teeth. “I’ve been repressing a lot of things about the fire, I’m sad to say.”

“It’s understandable, Alice,” Victor said comfortingly. “It was the most traumatic event of your life!”

“Yes, but – Victor? You know that key that Dr. Bumby uses to hypnotize all his patients?”

“. . .yes?”

“It’s my sister’s room key.”

There was a moment of charged silence. “. . .why does he have your sister’s room key?” Victor asked finally, voice dark.

“Because he was utterly obsessed with Lizzie, and – I think him not being able to handle her rejection of him. . .is what led to the fire.”

Hoki raised what on a normal person passed for an eyebrow. “Would now be a good time to mention that my release may require another soul to be put into the cauldron in my place? To keep it stable?”

“Yes. Yes, I think it would.”

#nebbychan #Happy Birthday #fanfic #victor van dort #alice liddell #horned king #the black cauldron #I did what I could with what I knew!#this taking place in some sort of variation on the Forgotten Vows Verse felt right #I don't know HOW the Cauldron ended up in a trash heap in Whitechapel #but here it is #maybe it was dug up by someone who tried to use it for soup #the soup came out tasting like the souls of the damned #so into the street it went XD #but yes Bumby is now in some very serious trouble #and Victor has a very scary magic teacher XD #hope you enjoy!#queued

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grim-echoes · 2 years

Text

people who make those cool videos about minor details in monster hunter games need to do one for the aggression system in rise because i've had some extremely egregious examples in sunbreak of it working far too well and causing monsters to engage me permanently (as long as i've remained in the same general area) despite either being outside of their line of sight or so far away in distance from them that the game de-renders certain objects and reduces animation frames, and the only reason i can think of for why this happens is because the game checks for general area proximity between you and a monster as well as certain obstructions in their radius (solid walls and the environment seem to count; many interior setpieces such as the shrine on top of the zorah magdaros skull in the frost islands do not) and does nothing to actually check for distance and whether you're in an open or a closed environment, so you get really cool (dumb) results from this such as:

monsters engaging you from ground level if you're on a raised area (but not out of range, and can either be in an open environment or a closed interior such as the aforementioned zorah shrine or the northeast shipwreck also in the frost islands) and not being able to actually physically harm you or connect with you in any way, but causing trip animations with certain attacks (nargacuga is a good example, the repositioning leaps evidently have a hitbox that extends farther upwards and outwards than what the animation implies which causes you to be tripped by a disconnected phantom attack out of nowhere)

monsters engaging you if you're completely vertically distanced and out of range, but fit the criteria of being technically within map proximity to them as well as in an open environment (observed extremely easily with the northwestern fortress in the citadel that overlooks the mountainous northern quadrant; standing on the wooden beam with the escuregot on it and waiting for a monster to move to the closest visible northern zone will trap it in a perpetual schrodinger's loop of engaging and disengaging with you until it naturally moves)

the second one is the most egregious because it's observably illogical--not only are you completely removed from the monster's immediate environment, there's no way it could possibly engage with you and yet that's also why it technically works as intended, because you're in close enough map proximity to that monster without anything obstructing its vision of you--and simultaneously because it cannot actually engage with you in any meaningful way (you've "moved" outside of its active interest range) it'll constantly cycle engagement until it eventually moves zones.

this isn't always consistent, likely because certain zones are programmed as player-safe or the visibility + proximity rules are in effect in ways that aren't immediately observable, but it's easy to replicate and you will more than likely experience it if you're in any locale for an extended period of time not necessarily engaging with a monster. would love to fuck around with this some more and see how true my hypothesis actually is because it makes me incredibly sad to see how almost "overly functional" the system is to a degree where i can no longer observe monsters behaving like actual animals interacting with their environment anymore, they're back to being game-ified setpieces with personality and characteristics that go entirely unnoticed if you aren't doggedly seeking those behaviors

#after typing this out i am now thoroughly invested in why this works the way it does #it's absurd and confusing and i'm desperate to know if anyone else has had similar experiences #and if my hypothesis makes any logistical sense #i like to think i have the right idea #mh

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yazprofessionalpractices · 25 days

Text

Critical Appraisal

What is my final outcome?

My final outcome for this project is a finalized 2D character for a collaborative games design brief, in which we have made a playable platform game, named “Shadow and the Magic Umbrella”. The story behind the character is supported by the idea that it must hide from the light to get to the end point of the game. The environment in which it travels gradually turns from being an abandoned, mechanical factory setting to a wild, overgrown forest, as the levels progress. The prop held by the character is a steam-punk style umbrella, which the shadow has found along the way, once belonging to a human. It uses this object to hide itself from the sporadic light shining through the shrouded area, as well as to help it float above obstacles. The tapered end of the shadow’s head emits a purple glow, signifying a magical element, as well has having connotations of mystery, power and ambition.

What went well?

I think that overall, the artwork came out effectively for this project, and we were all able to come up with successful assets as a team. I was particularly happy with the moth NPC character I created, following the brief I was given from the games design students. This was a fairly niche concept to have to create artwork for, but with some referencing and research, I was able to produce an interesting design, along with a sprite sheet for the animation. I think that we communicated effectively as a team to produce all the elements we needed for the game to be complete, despite some issues with timing at the start. The design students were helpful in their putting across of ideas to us in the thought generation stage and we felt confident in what we were making. Collaborating was a key part of this project, and I feel that we did this sufficiently which ultimately led to our success as a team in the end.

What did I struggle with?

The part of the project that I struggled with the most was definitely the frame-by-frame animation part of character creation. I struggled to grasp how I might go about altering the character frames into a sequence that worked when put together to suggest movement. I wasn’t sure how the character would actually move or get around the scene, given it’s fluid structure and mainly due to the fact that I had never tried to animate a character before – I was going into this hugely un-equipped for success. After some turmoil, I gradually started making progress by duplicating character frames, erasing and altering certain parts in order to change the pose each time. As I was doing this from scratch each time, I had no idea how this would look in the end. Luckily the animation that I produced did work effectively and the rest of my team were happy with what I had made.

What would I do differently next time?

If I were to do this again, I would have put more research into how I could have animated my characters more effectively. Since completing the project, I have learnt how to use the Timeline tab in Photoshop, which aids frame-by-frame animation. When I did my frames, I didn’t have the “onion skin” layer from the previous frame to help me, or any real guideline. I think that if I had taken less time on this part of the artwork creation, I could’ve had more time to possibly help my teammates with other parts of the asset list necessary for gameplay. Further on this, something I would have done differently is make more frames for the animation, thus making a more fluid and seamless loop. This would have made the movement seem far more realistic and powerful for the player, and ultimately more immersive. Despite this, I think that the rough, sketchy style of the artwork is charming and adds to the stylistic nature of the overall outcome.

What did I learn from this project?

Undertaking this project taught me a great deal about creative collaboration. This was my first time working with a group of other students to produce a fully realized digital game – it was also my first time working with students from another pathway. It was important for me to learn the value of timekeeping and to have certain elements ready for the team by a deadline so that it could be used in production. I felt that it thrust us all into an environment where we had to communicate sufficiently, otherwise the work would suffer greatly. We were all able to voice our opinions on how the project was going, things we would like to change, and setting the pace for workflow. I think that we all rose to the occasion and were ultimately successful in this project. It goes without saying that I learnt valuable skills about 2D animation, and the steps required to execute this – I look forward to using the skills I have learnt throughout the Professional Practices unit in my future work.

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johnsmcmanus93 · 4 months

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Cat-Care Expertise That Will Certainly Assist All Pet cat Owners

cat food The noise of a feline purring is a delight audio to lay eyes on. This will certainly unwind you, and it can likewise mean that the cat is relaxing as well. This is why you must make certain that you take terrific treatment of your cat. These pointers can assist you hear their purring a lot more typically. If your feline instantly goes off its feed for no obvious reason, attempt alluring treats such as jack mackerel, tuna, or lotion of poultry soup in little quantities. These are not complete foods and also should not be fed long-term, however they are incredibly delicious to cats. A finicky feline might begin consuming again and maintain on when given among these treats. Make certain you do not allow your pet cat to be around drape cables. If the pet cat comes to be captured in a loop, they can choke to death. This might injure or kill them. Pin and conceal drape cords to prevent this. Regular veterinary checkups are necessary for the health and wellness of your feline. The vet will certainly be able to give your feline with required inoculations and also any medications it requires. Veterinarians likewise maintain tabs on your pet cat's overall wellness and diagnose any kind of troubles they find. Your pet cat will certainly be much more comfortable if you proceed using the same vet. In this way, the physician will certainly be familiar with the background of your cat. You need to not make use of products developed for various other animals. If you attempt to make use of items indicated for canines, it can make your cat unwell, or even kill him. One product specifically to pay very close attention to is any type of remedy for fleas as well as ticks. These canine flea products can even trigger feline fatality. After your dog receives a flea treatment, keep your pet cat away for at the very least a few hours. To maintain your cat healthy and enhance its bond with you, always established aside great deals of play time. Kitties specifically require great deals of attention, which you can quickly provide to them through play. Draw an item of string around for an enjoyable as well as gentle means to maintain a feline captivated for hrs! If you discover you cat is harming furniture or other objects, it might be tired. Maintain a couple of safe toys around for your pet cat to play with. Scratching messages can additionally prevent your pet cat from damaging your furnishings. Or, build a small pet cat residence out of cardboard. Your feline will love belonging to hide, and the cardboard can additionally be utilized to scratch on! Silicon chip your pet cat. You never recognize when your cat could avoid you. Collars and also tags can assist obtain your feline house, nevertheless felines are professionals at shaking out of these, in addition to the threat they position if they were to get snagged on a bush or tree branch. A teeny microchip can hold your call information. Numerous veterinarians as well as sanctuaries have scanners that can check out these chips as well as because they exist under their skin, they will not obtain lost. Bear in mind that very young youngsters can be a little bit too harsh with a feline or new kitten. Instruct your kids how to treat a pet cat. Help them discover exactly how to grab a cat as well as treatment for it. Cats' bones are much more fragile than those of pets, so they need gentler treatment. If your feline needs to have a surgical procedure such as being purified or neutered, they will certainly require rest when they come home. It is hard to maintain a pet cat from raising on furniture, yet essential to avoid taking out stitches. Mark a location in your residence for your pet cat to recuperate where they will be less most likely to wound themselves, up until they are healed sufficient to wander cost-free. Brush your pet cat frequently. Brushing spreads all-natural oils via the fur as well as additionally promotes blood circulation. As an included perk, it cuts down on loose fur. Prevent the choking that can be a result of hairballs which slowly develop as your cat bridegrooms himself. Feed your feline leading quality food. Ensure that the food your feline eats is extremely high in protein. Corn and also other such protein-free fillers are things you desire to stay faraway from. Cats are naturally meat-eating. If you wish to keep them healthy and balanced as well as satisfied, you need to feed them a lot of pet healthy protein. Sometime a 2nd cat will relax a solitary devastating pet cat. This seems counter-intuitive, asking for two times the destruction, but a 2nd feline can provide both something to do. Present them gradually as well as anticipate some first spats. After a while, however, the cats will normally manage and the damaging behavior will diminish. Anyone that has a pet cat wishes to provide the very best treatment possible, considering that a satisfied cat will purr much more. Taking care of your animal can be simple if you use the understandings you have actually discovered right here. When you wish to enjoy a lot more purring, utilize the ideas you have actually simply read.

#chicken soup cat food #cat food

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jcmarchi · 5 months

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A flexible solution to help artists improve animation - Technology Org

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/a-flexible-solution-to-help-artists-improve-animation-technology-org/

A flexible solution to help artists improve animation - Technology Org

Artists who bring to life heroes and villains in animated movies and video games could have more control over their animations, thanks to a new technique introduced by MIT researchers.

Their method generates mathematical functions known as barycentric coordinates, which define how 2D and 3D shapes can bend, stretch, and move through space. For example, an artist using their tool could choose functions that make the motions of a 3D cat’s tail fit their vision for the “look” of the animated feline.

Many other techniques for this problem are inflexible, providing only a single option for the barycentric coordinate functions for a certain animated character. Each function may or may not be best for a particular animation. The artist would have to start from scratch with a new approach each time they want to try for a slightly different look.

“As researchers, we can sometimes get stuck in a loop of solving artistic problems without consulting with artists. Artists care about flexibility and the ‘look’ of their final product. They don’t care about the partial differential equations your algorithm solves behind the scenes,” says Ana Dodik, lead author of a paper on this technique.

Beyond its artistic applications, this technique could be used in areas such as medical imaging, architecture, virtual reality, and even in computer vision as a tool to help robots figure out how objects move in the real world.

Dodik, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student, wrote the paper with Oded Stein, assistant professor at the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering; Vincent Sitzmann, assistant professor of EECS who leads the Scene Representation Group in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); and senior author Justin Solomon, an associate professor of EECS and leader of the CSAIL Geometric Data Processing Group. The research was recently presented at SIGGRAPH Asia.

A generalized approach

When an artist animates a 2D or 3D character, one common technique is to surround the complex shape of the character with a simpler set of points connected by line segments or triangles, called a cage. The animator drags these points to move and deform the character inside the cage. The key technical problem is determining how the character moves when the cage is modified; this motion is determined by the design of a particular barycentric coordinate function.

Traditional approaches use complicated equations to find cage-based motions that are extremely smooth, avoiding kinks that could develop in a shape when it is stretched or bent to the extreme. But there are many notions of how the artistic idea of “smoothness” translates into math, each leading to a different set of barycentric coordinate functions.

The MIT researchers sought a general approach that allows artists to have a say in designing or choosing among smoothness energies for any shape. Then the artist could preview the deformation and choose the smoothness energy that looks the best to their taste.

Although flexible design of barycentric coordinates is a modern idea, the basic mathematical construction of barycentric coordinates dates back centuries. Introduced by the German mathematician August Möbius in 1827, barycentric coordinates dictate how each corner of a shape exerts influence over the shape’s interior.

In a triangle, which is the shape Möbius used in his calculations, barycentric coordinates are easy to design — but when the cage isn’t a triangle, the calculations become messy. Making barycentric coordinates for a complicated cage is especially difficult because, for complex shapes, each barycentric coordinate must meet a set of constraints while being as smooth as possible.

Diverging from past work, the team used a special type of neural network to model the unknown barycentric coordinate functions. A neural network, loosely based on the human brain, processes an input using many layers of interconnected nodes.

While neural networks are often applied in AI applications that mimic human thought, in this project neural networks are used for a mathematical reason. The researchers’ network architecture knows how to output barycentric coordinate functions that satisfy all the constraints exactly. They build the constraints directly into the network, so when it generates solutions, they are always valid. This construction helps artists design interesting barycentric coordinates without having to worry about mathematical aspects of the problem.

“The tricky part was building in the constraints. Standard tools didn’t get us all the way there, so we really had to think outside the box,” Dodik says.

Virtual triangles

The researchers drew on the triangular barycentric coordinates Möbius introduced nearly 200 years ago. These triangular coordinates are simple to compute and satisfy all the necessary constraints, but modern cages are much more complex than triangles.

To bridge the gap, the researchers’ method covers a shape with overlapping virtual triangles connecting triplets of points outside the cage.

“Each virtual triangle defines a valid barycentric coordinate function. We just need a way of combining them,” she says.

That is where the neural network comes in. It predicts how to combine the virtual triangles’ barycentric coordinates to make a more complicated but smooth function.

Using their method, an artist could try one function, look at the final animation, and then tweak the coordinates to generate different motions until they arrive at an animation that looks the way they want.

“From a practical perspective, I think the biggest impact is that neural networks give you a lot of flexibility that you didn’t previously have,” Dodik says.

The researchers demonstrated how their method could generate more natural-looking animations than other approaches, like a cat’s tail that curves smoothly when it moves instead of folding rigidly near the vertices of the cage.

In the future, they want to try different strategies to accelerate the neural network. They also want to build this method into an interactive interface, enabling an artist to iterate on real-time animations easily.

Written by Adam Zewe

Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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