Bruhhh I think the guy that used to live at my place is breaking into my mailbox regularly 😭

Invisible String, Part 1 (Colton Parayko)

Request: Can you write an imagine where the reader is John Krasinski’s [niece] but she’s dating Colton Parayko and like she has to breaks the news and John acts mad or something and scares them but then he says he’s joking and he’s fine with it? Thanks

***NOTE***: I changed some details in the last scene b/c I moved the timeline up from October 7 to September 14.

A/N: I’m back! The protagonist is an OC but I decided to call her Y/N instead of giving her an actual name b/c John Krasinski has nieces and/or nephews irl. I already planned the entire plot but idk whether the series will be 2 or 3 parts—I’ll post an update when I know more. This series takes place from March 2018 to June 2019 and is loosely based on Taylor Swift’s “Invisible String.” Here is the playlist.

Warnings: Six swear words, rough breakup, alcohol, loneliness & homesickness

Word Count: 3.4k

March 21, 2018

You were impervious to the mix of pitying and derisive glances from passersby as you sat on the curb. You knew you looked like a cliché, crying in front of a restaurant because your boyfriend broke up with you on your 22nd birthday, but you didn’t care. One question gnawed at you: how had six words upended your seemingly perfect day and relationship?

Your brain was buzzing with activity, wondering if Max had given you any clues that something was amiss. This morning, you woke up in his Cambridge apartment to him singing “Happy Birthday” while kneeling at the side of the bed. As soon as Max finished singing, he kissed you before grabbing his backpack and hurrying out of the room. That didn’t mean anything, though: Max was one of the only seniors to have the misfortune of taking all morning classes because his major was Theater, Dance, and Media. He was also (as usual) running late.

The rest of the day unfolded like any other Wednesday as you followed your schedule of lounging in bed, studying for an hour, going to the sandwich shop across the street for lunch, and heading to campus at 1PM for your classes. Afterwards, you went back to the apartment to find Max waiting there, already dressed for dinner. You quickly showered, curled your long (Y/HC) hair, and changed into a dark green dress and black booties before taking his hand and going to an Italian restaurant in Boston’s North End.

There were no warning signs at dinner, either. In fact, everything was perfect until you were waiting for the check and Max said with a detached look in his eyes, “I think we should break up.”

You didn’t want to relive what happened next, but the images of you acting like Elle Woods when Warner broke up with her in Legally Blonde popped into your head unbidden. You closed your eyes in humiliation and shame as you remembered Max, the man you dated for three years, abandoning you at the table and fleeing the restaurant. The other customers stared at you, some sympathetic, others scandalized, and the rest in pure shock.

You snapped out of the flashback when you felt a large hand rest on your shoulder. You whipped your head around to find a young man with blonde hair and black rimmed glasses squatting next to you on the curb.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

The panic faded as you took in the man’s features. He was definitely in his 20s, probably a few years older than you, and his blue eyes were filled with concern. Something about that concern, though, made you snap.

“Do I look like I’m okay? I mean, come on, look at me!” you demanded while pointing at your face, which you (correctly) assumed had giant black streaks of mascara on it.

You fully expected the man to walk away and leave you be, but he sat down on the curb instead and said, “My bad, that was a stupid question. I’ve got some tissues if you want them?”

That made your attitude soften. He was only trying to help, so you nodded and he handed you a pack of tissues from his pocket. You smiled at him, took the tissues, and wiped your eyes and face. As soon as you were satisfied that they were clean, you broke the silence. “Thank you…?”

“Colton, and it’s no problem. What’s your name?”

“Y/N.” You held out your hand for him to shake, which he did. After a pause, you asked: “Why did you stop? Surely you have somewhere better to be tonight.”

He chuckled, and the sound of it made your heart flutter. “I was just heading back to my hotel when I saw you, and I figured I’d stop and make sure you get home safe. That is, assuming you live here?”

“Yeah, I live in Cambridge.” As soon as the words left your mouth, you realized they were no longer true, so you amended your statement. “Well, I lived in Cambridge until about 15 minutes ago when my now ex-boyfriend dumped me. On my fucking birthday.”

“Shit, that sucks. I’m really sorry.” He paused before adding, “I’m assuming he isn’t here.”

“Nope. He hightailed it out of the restaurant as soon as he got his credit card back.”

Colton shook his head. “What a jackass.”

“I know, right? I wasted three whole years with someone who not only broke up with me in a very public setting on my birthday, but also couldn’t be bothered to ask where I would go! He probably assumed I’d go to my parents’ house, but still.”

“Your parents live here?” Colton asked as he fished his phone out of his pocket and unlocked it.

“Yeah, right by Boston Common, why?”

“I’ll get an Uber and drop you off before going back to the hotel.”

“Oh no, you don’t have to do that,” you protested while going through your bag for your phone. “We just met! I’ll pay.”

“Nonsense. You’ve been through a lot tonight. Let me take care of it.”

You stared into Colton’s eyes and realized he wasn’t going to back down. It took everything in you to suppress your pride, thank him, and provide the address. Colton typed it into his phone, waited for a moment, and said, “The closest one is around the block.”

“That’s good.” Your burst of energy dissipated as quickly as it came, and you fell silent. From the corner of your eye, you saw Colton open his mouth as if to say something before the headlights of a car momentarily blinded you.

“That’s the Uber.” Colton stood up and offered his hand, and you took it. You couldn’t help but notice how well they fit together as he pulled you up and off the curb, but after regaining your balance, something else grabbed your attention: his height.

“Gee, how tall are you? No one’s ever made me feel like a dwarf before,” you joked as he led you to the car, your hands still intertwined.

He chuckled and opened the door for you. You let go of his hand and slid into the car. After Colton slid in next to you and shut the door, he replied, “I’m 6’6” and no one’s ever made me feel like I’m not a giant before. You’re what, 5’10”?”

“6 feet, actually,” you corrected him. “So, where are you from, Colton?”

“St. Albert; it’s just outside Edmonton in Canada, but I’ve been in the States for a while. I went to the University of Alaska in Fairbanks before moving to, uh, St. Louis.”

You noticed Colton’s hesitancy and the fact that he lowered his voice when saying “St. Louis,” and you were about to ask why when you thought better of it. You were protective of your privacy, too, especially whenever people commented about how funny it was that you shared the same last name as John Krasinski. It wasn’t a coincidence—he was your uncle, and the two of you were extremely close—but you went along with it and never corrected them because it wasn’t their business. So, you let it go. “And what brings you to Boston?”

“Work,” he said before changing the subject. “What do you do? Are you still in school or—”

“I’m a senior at Harvard,” you cut him off. You generally didn’t drop the “H-bomb,” as you and your friends called it, with people you didn’t know well, but this was a special case. Colton just confirmed he was hiding something, and after looking at him in better lighting, his face seemed familiar, which weirded you out. You had to get back on equal footing, and the H-bomb almost always unsettled people.

“Wow, you must be really smart,” Colton said, seeming impressed but unphased. You couldn’t help yourself from raising an eyebrow as he asked, “What’s your major?”

“Government. What was yours?”

“Business administration.”

“Ah.” You fell silent again, this time on purpose, as you racked your brain for where you might have crossed paths with Colton. He wasn’t from Boston, not even close, but you couldn’t shake the feeling that you’d seen him before, and recently.

Colton didn’t let you ruminate for long before reviving the conversation. “What do you want to do when you graduate?”

“I’ll be a lawyer one day, but I have to be a paralegal first. I’m looking for jobs right now.”

Before Colton could reply, the car came to a stop. You looked out the window and saw your parents’ townhouse and your childhood home.Your time in the car had flown by, a sensation you rarely, if ever, experienced. And there was something between you and Colton, a connection you couldn’t quite describe, that made you want to spend more time with him. But your time was up. “This is me. It was nice to meet you, Colton, and thanks again for the ride—I really appreciate it.”

“It’s no problem,” he replied. “I’m glad I found you.”

You were overwhelmed by an intense desire to ask for his number. If only he lived in Boston or somewhere in the Northeast. But he lived in St. Louis, so you moved to open the door, only to feel Colton’s hand wrap around yours and hear him say: “Y/N?”

“Yeah?” You turned around and locked eyes with him. It was like being in a trance, and your heartbeat thundered in your ears.

It felt like years, but it was more like a few moments before Colton let go of your hand. “Good luck with the search. I’m sure you’ll find a good job.”

You wanted to let out a sigh of disappointment, but you just said, “Thanks,” and smiled at him before getting out of the car.

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

The smell of bacon finally lured you out of your bed at noon the next day.

It had been a rough night. The reality of the breakup hit you like a ton of bricks when you rang the doorbell and all but collapsed in your mom’s arms when she answered the door. She brought you over to the couch, where your dad was waiting anxiously. As soon as you sat down, you grabbed your mom and cried for an hour straight as she held you and stroked your hair. You knew Max wasn’t worth your tears, but it had more to do with you. Despite his major, he wasn’t that good of an actor, and yet, he fooled you into thinking he could be your person. You took immense pride in your instincts, but they failed you with Max. How could you have possibly fallen in love with such a heartless person? More terrifying, would you have ended up marrying him a few years down the road if he hadn’t broken up with you?

You didn’t know the answer to either question, so you stopped crying and began venting about how the breakup went down. Your dad almost hit the ceiling after hearing that Max left you at the restaurant, and you had to talk him out of driving to Cambridge to “give that little shit a piece of my mind!” That wasn’t to say you weren’t thinking about revenge, but your dad potentially getting arrested was not helpful. After that, you started crying again, only this time out of frustration, and didn’t stop until you practically passed out on the couch. The last thing you remembered was your parents guiding you up the stairs to your bed.

Thankfully, you had no classes on Thursdays, so you were able to sleep in and be, if nothing else, well-rested. Your stomach rumbled when you smelled the bacon, so you got out of bed and made your way down the stairs to the kitchen, where your parents were sitting at the table and watching the television.

“Ugh, why are you watching the news?” you said as a way of greeting while making a beeline for the bacon.

“Good morning to you, too, sweetheart,” your dad replied. “I’m waiting for the sports report. I missed the game last night and Uncle John wouldn’t tell me the score. He said he’s sorry about, I quote, ‘the scumbag’ and he’ll call you tonight.”

“God, I miss him. And you,” you addressed your mom as you shoveled a load of bacon onto your plate, “are the best.”

“See, honey? I knew bacon would cheer her up,” she said to your dad.

“I didn’t doubt it. Y/N, we have to figure out a time to get your stuff from that piece of shit’s apartment. I’m not letting you go by yourself, but do you want to let him know ahead of time or just show up?”

“Who did the B’s play?” you sat down at the table and changed the subject immediately. You didn’t care about sports, but your dad and Uncle John were major Bruins fans and the mere mention of Max gave you a headache.

“The Blues.”

“Where do they play again?” you asked as you ate your bacon. It had to be a team from the Western Conference, but the only teams you knew there were the Canucks and Blackhawks because they were on your dad’s shit list.

“St. Louis.”

You almost choked on your food. “What?”

“St. Louis, sweetie. You know, the Gateway Arch—”

“Yeah, I know, Mom,” you recovered. “That’s the team Jenna likes, right, Dad?”

“Yes. Shh, here it is!” He didn’t need to tell you twice; you doubted Colton was a professional hockey player, but your curiosity won out as you intently watched the television.

The score flashed on the screen—an OT loss for the Bruins—and your dad groaned. “Ugh, I’ve got to turn this garbage off.”

And suddenly, a few Blues players, including one that looked awfully similar to Colton (albeit without glasses), flashed onto the screen. You didn’t get a good enough look at him to be sure, though, because your dad changed the channel. You let out a noise of frustration.

“What’s wrong, sweetie?” your mom asked, and your dad looked like he had the same question when he turned away from the television.

“I’ll text the scumbag and tell him I’m coming this afternoon, if that’s okay with you, Dad,” you said. “I want to get it over with and besides, I need my laptop and textbooks.”

“That’s perfect, sweetheart. The office doesn’t need me today, anyway.”

“Okay, I’ll be right back; my phone’s upstairs,” you called out behind you as you raced back up the stairs. You did not want to text Max, but it was better than telling your dad that the man he praised for making sure you got home last night was potentially part of the team responsible for his beloved Bruins’ loss.

You locked your bedroom door and grabbed your phone to pull up Google and the St. Louis Blues roster. Part of you thought there was no way a professional hockey player actually cared enough to bring you home, but the Blues being in town and one of its members resembling Colton were too many coincidences for your liking. You tapped your foot impatiently as the phone loaded the roster, and you scrolled through the list until you found a name of interest.

“C. Parayko, 55, R, 6’6’’…”

It cut off after that, so you scrolled sideways to see the other information. It left you without a shadow of doubt, but you clicked on the name anyway to view a picture. Colton’s headshot and full first name stared back at you as if they were looking into your soul.

It really was him. You had to have seen him on the little television at the sandwich shop’s register yesterday.

But what did this information mean for you, really, besides discovering his identity? It was nice to know his full name because it confirmed that he was a real person instead of a delusion your reeling mind made up, but it didn’t change one important fact: you lived in Boston and he lived in St. Louis. Barring a radical change in one of your lives, which you didn’t see happening, that was the reality of the situation. It was time to stop dreaming and confront your immediate future.

You pulled up Max’s number and began composing the text which, after several drafts, read: “I’ll be at the apartment today from 3 to 5. My dad’s coming with me, so make yourself scarce. I want my shit back.”

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

6 months later: September 14, 2018

You were miserable only two weeks after relocating to St. Louis.

It was funny how one phone call could completely change someone’s life. In your case, said phone call involved an extremely attractive job offer with a clear path for advancement within one year. The offers you had received from legal firms in Boston, New York, D.C., and Philadelphia were underwhelming, to say the least, and you were only a week away from graduation. You had already endured a lot of change this year, so why not one more?

After nearly giving your parents a heart attack but ultimately receiving their blessing, you accepted the offer and moved to St. Louis on September 1st. Uncle John had been especially supportive, enlisting Jenna (known by the rest of the world as Pam from The Office) to fly out from L.A. and show you around the city last week. She made sure you knew the ins and outs of the city, which you really appreciated. You also loved your job. You were doing important work every day, and your boss was already hinting at giving you the promotion you wanted. 

So, why were you unhappy? It was your social life, or rather, lack of one. You didn’t know anyone in St. Louis, and while your coworkers weren’t mean, they didn’t make you feel welcome, either.

That seemed to have changed earlier today when two of your desk neighbors who were around your age, Harper and Ellie, invited you out for drinks after work. You couldn’t have been happier. You went home after work, did your hair and makeup, put on your favorite royal blue mini dress, and met them at the dive bar you recommended. You were so excited on the way over that you could barely sit still; maybe you’d make friends with these girls and finally feel like you fit in in this city.

Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. Harper and Ellie abandoned you within less than five minutes after two guys came over and asked them to dance. You were now sitting at the bar alone, nursing a cocktail and despairing over your situation.

It was times like these when you thought about Colton. It had been six months since you’d met him in Boston, and you didn’t want to risk looking like a lunatic by slipping into his DMs on Instagram, but you were getting desperate. It was bad enough that being from the Northeast made you stick out like a sore thumb, but the loneliness was eating you alive, and the combination made you feel unmoored. Maybe a familiar and friendly face could change that.

As if God had answered your prayers, you heard a commotion near the entrance. You swiveled your stool in that direction and saw a group of tall, good-looking men in their 20s entering the bar. The tallest one had blonde hair and black rimmed glasses.

It was Colton.

Your brain screamed at you to look away and approach him after he settled in, but you couldn’t take your eyes off of him as he laughed at something one of his friends said. It was as if he felt your stare because he suddenly looked in your direction and appeared to gasp.

It was only then that you turned away and faced the bar, drinking the rest of your cocktail in a few gulps. You were so embarrassed; he probably thought you were a stalker or something. You were about to flag down the bartender for another drink when you felt that familiar large hand rest on your shoulder.

You turned your head and found Colton staring at you, his blue eyes full of incredulity and…happiness?

“Y/N. It’s really you,” he breathed.

For soft!Villanelle—5 years later, after the Villanelle goes through a spree across Europe and finally dismantles the 12, and Eve just welcoming V home with open arms.

she didn’t think she’d be this nervous.

she’s never nervous.

people like her don’t get nervous.

but now, her clammy hands grip the cab door handle and nearly slip off, and she is proving all the psychology textbooks wrong.

it wasn’t hard to find her new address. a quick google, and eve’s name showed up in an article about her receiving an award for her work in taking down an international terrorist conspiracy. she’s the head of her own department at mi6. carolyn martens was fired shortly after she was charged with treason for trading state secrets with other nations and organizations.

villanelle phoned the department, disguising her voice as a bubbly british government official looking to mail a certificate to eve’s home. the assistant, who sounded remarkably like elena, gave it to her easily, and villanelle wondered if she knew who she actually was.

they haven’t spoke in the five years since the shooting. a text message here or there about the locations of safehouses for high ranking members of the 12, but nothing more. she never tried to communicate further. she was afraid. afraid eve wouldn’t forgive her.

but most of all, she was embarrassed. embarrassed of her actions. the hurt, the pain and rejection, she couldn’t handle it, and she dealt with it the only way she knew how. and god what a stupid fucking decision that was.

she turned around after a few steps, realizing her mistake. she ran faster than her legs could carry her and scooped eve’s unconscious body into her arms. she carried her outside the ruins, hot wired a car, and sped to the hospital as fast as she could. eve was just starting to gain consciousness as she placed her outside the emergency room entrance.

she let out an audible groan when villanelle propped her up.

villanelle pulled her close, burying her face in her hair. “i’m sorry. i didn’t—“

eve doesn’t let her finish. “i know.” she coughs and looks villanelle in the eyes. “i know.”

she slowly cocks her head at the car, and villanelle takes the signal to leave. she gets up, stiff, and climbs back in the vehicle. she can feel eve’s eyes burning into her as she turns the ignition.

eve recovered, obviously. villanelle would call the hospital every day for updates, each time using a different accent and name for both her and eve’s amusement. then, a few months later, she received a long text from eve, describing how she planned to take down the 12 using a new informant, and she needed villanelle’s help to take care of the less legal aspects. villanelle agreed. she would always agree.

so began a partnership of few words. an address, a name, a picture. and villanelle would be off. she snapped their necks one by one over the course of five years. she thought of eve for every moment of it. until it was over.

she debated contacting eve for weeks after she killed the last of the 12. she wondered if eve forgave her. if she still wanted her the way she once did.

it was the article that made the decision for her. eve’s bright smile as she accepted her award for her service to the country. villanelle traced her thumb over the outline of her lips, and now she is in a car outside eve’s new london flat.

the cabbie clears his throat, annoyed. “we’re here. are you going to get out or should i keep the meter going?”

villanelle shakes her head and shoves a wad of bills into his palm. “keep the change.”

“th-th-thank you, ma’am,” he sputters as she climbs out, slamming the door behind her.

the journey to the front door is treacherous. sheer willpower drags her feet forward. her heart attempts to claw it’s way out of her chest.

she shakily raises a finger to the doorbell. and honestly, this nervous feeling kind of sucks. she remembers when she couldn’t feel things. the overwhelming numbness and boredom. now, she feels so much, and she realizes being normal is fucking annoying. here she is, a cold blooded killer, terrified to talk to a woman who can barely shoot a gun.

but, she guesses, eve is more than that.

she takes the leap and presses the bell. it rings loud and clear, and she hears footsteps flurry from upstairs.

“coming!” a voice calls. villanelle freezes. she’s back at the hospital again. i know, eve says, i know.

before she has time to react, the door swings open, revealing a disheveled eve. she wears a loose t shirt and a pair of joggers. her hair is down but in complete disarray. she’s holding at least 2 packed binders in her arms.

and god, is she beautiful.

eve raises her eyebrows, but is clearly not surprised to see villanelle at her doorstep.

“hi,” villanelle manages past the lump in her throat.

“hi,” eve replies.

they stare at each other for a couple seconds.

“you called my office. elena told me.”

villanelle nods slowly, eyes caught on eve’s lips.

eve steps to the side and turns her head away. “do you want to come in?”

villanelle blinks in surprise. “yes.”

“okay.” eve opens the door wider, and villanelle crosses the threshold.

the inside of the flat is very eve. it’s walls are bare, papers and photos are strewn across every surface. there’s some old takeout containers on the countertop. eve looks sheepish.

“sorry for the mess. it’s been crazy.”

“i don’t mind.” villanelle glances around more, appreciating her idiosyncrasies.

silence again.

eve runs a hand through her hair. “you look the same.”

“so do you,” villanelle smiles back.

eve laughs. “oh god no. i must be almost completely gray at this point. me and hair dye have become best friends.”

villanelle shakes her head, stepping closer, palms still sweaty. eve sucks in a breath but doesn’t move.

“you look beautiful,” she murmurs, desperately wanting to touch her. she refrains for the time being.

brushing a lock of hair behind her ear, eve puts her gaze to the ground. “thank you.” her voice is lower than before.

she jerks her head to the mess of a kitchen. “do you want water or a drink? some champagne maybe?”

villanelle chuckles. “i am okay, eve.” she tries to act blasé and hopes it isn’t abundantly clear she doesn’t know what she’s doing. around her, she never does.

“i poured some wine before so i’m just gonna...” she makes a gesture to a mug sitting on the countertop.

“please go ahead.”

eve pads over and takes a sip. “it’s over, huh. weird, isn’t it?”

villanelle follows. “it is.”

“what will you do now? there’s no one left to kill.”

“oh eve,” villanelle sighs. “there’s always people to kill.”

eve snorts into her mug. “i guess that’s true.”

“but,” villanelle shrugs off her coat and puts it over a chair with a metric ton of papers stacked onto it, “i’m thinking of retiring. or at least, a long vacation.”

“yeah?” eve takes a big sip. “where will you go?”

they lock eyes.

“i don’t know. i was thinking alaska. i haven’t forgotten about it.”

“mm.” eve muses. her sip turns into a swig.

villanelle clenches her teeth, drinking in eve’s appearance, her smell, her everything. she decides to open the floodgates because she might as well. “remember what you told me in my apartment? that day you stabbed me.”

“i remember.” eve’s expression is unreadable. it’s ironic because the diagnosed psychopath wears her heart on her sleeve, but this seemingly normal woman can hide herself in plain sight.

villanelle takes a deep breath.

“i haven’t stopped thinking about you.”

she doesn’t dare look at eve. she’s too afraid of what she’ll see. anger. rejection. amusement. all possibilities at this point.

she hears eve’s mug clatter as she puts it down. suddenly, eve’s body is next to hers. they haven’t been this close since rome. heat radiates off of her, their chests almost touching.

she feels a cool palm on her cheek, turning her head in eve’s direction, gently but with purpose, so she is forced to look at eve in the eyes.

the shorter woman is staring at her, ferocity burning in her expression. one of the things villanelle loves about her.

“me neither.” eve whispers. villanelle feels herself tremble and silently scolds her body for betraying her.

“i’m sorry.” villanelle echoes the words she said five years ago on the emergency room steps. a tear rolls down her cheek.

arms wrap around her in a tight hug. eve’s pulls her close, squeezing as much as possible as if to stop the tremors wracking through her. villanelle wraps her fingers in eve’s hair and soaks her in.

“i know.” eve’s breath is hot on her neck. “i know.”

and villanelle knows too. she knows.

Red Web Mystery Reviews

Red Web is a podcast by Rooster Teeth featuring two guys from that whole Achievement Hunter thing that I can never tell apart (but you don’t need to know anything about this) about unsolved mysteries that often but not always have something to do with the internet. Let’s review the episodes out so far, because… well, no reason, honestly, I just wanted to.

Lake City Quiet Pills

Based on their information presented here, this whole thing and their explanation for it seem plausible enough. You have to assume that this group of apparently assassins is kind of bad at operational security, but there’s actually a lot of cases where big criminals got exposed because they used the same URL or E-mail address or similar.

Satoshi Nakamoto

I already knew about this beforehand, and I would say they did a good job explaining it. Personally, I think they should have gone into a bit more of how much a shit-show the whole Newsweek Dorian Nakamoto thing was; in short, there was no reason to believe this person had anything to do with Bitcoin, he didn’t even speak good english (which is probably what caused some of the misunderstandings), and it was both a huge embarrassment for Newsweek (at least I hope they felt embarrassed) and they needlessly hounded a completely uninvolved person for this.

But then they get into new evidence, and we see a problem that I think is a bit systematic: They don’t really go into how trustworthy the evidence is. Specifically, they say that the one person who can cast light on this might be… John McAfee. Fucking John McAfee. Seriously, that guy?

For context: John McAfee did indeed create the antivirus company that still bears his name. But he sold it in the 1990s, and thanks to money and drugs, he’s just gotten plain crazy ever since. There was the whole thing where he was implicated in a murder in Belize a couple of years ago; he kept blogging from a jail in Guatemala, later returned to the US, and keeps being part of outlandish schemes (including two presidential runs, though he failed to get the nomination for libertarian candidate both 2016 and 2020), controversies, and supposedly super-awesome tech startups that never go anywhere. It makes perfect sense that he’d claim to be involved in the creation of Bitcoin. It makes no sense whatsoever to believe him. If you’re interested and have way too much time, read what El Reg has to say about him.

Mortis

Oh god. This one makes me both want to laugh and cry. Mostly laugh, to be honest, because it is such an obvious nothing burger, but also weep for the internet that was.

The story is that they found a participant in an early internet warez network who wasn’t that great at OpSec. This is only fully revealed at the end, and they don’t even seem to have noticed that this case is clearly and completely solved.

Most of the humour for me comes from the fact that they’re rediscovering the old pre-social web, and are convinced that it’s all weird and nefarious. Why would one person register websites for their interests, and then never do anything with them? Because that’s what the internet was like back then in the late 1990s and early 2000s! Hey, look, here’s my ugly special-interest website from that era that hasn’t been updated in years and isn’t going to be updated any time soon either. That’s just what was normal back then. Same with a website for every person, or trying to do your own garage sales via your website. That was the thing to do back then. And yes, obviously it sucked and didn’t work very well.

They even realise that this is what „might“ have been going on, and theorise about this hypothetical early web. „Maybe if there was some website that linked all these together and allowed you to search“ - yeah, those existed. Digg and Technorati and Del.icio.us, remember those? All bought by Yahoo and promptly forgotten. And to be fair, they never worked as well as real social networks did.

But back then we had this glorious freedom. No sudden porn bans like here on Tumblr; no need to match any predefined template for what posts are, no user tracking by Facebook, nobody telling you that you’re tagging your posts wrong…

It’s understandable why we lost that web. Linking together is much easier if all content is owned and controlled by like four companies. It also makes it much easier to set up a new account; setting up a new website is just a lot of pain and knowledge you have to have that you don’t necessarily want to have.

But now we live in our monocultures and must live with whatever content decisions our corporate overlords make and then sell us as „community standards“, and the wild and weird web that we used to have is only a memory. And sometimes not even that; sometimes these new young kids treat it as a „weird nefarious mystery“. Actually, I just looked it up, and Alfredo and Trevor are both around 30, just a few years younger than I am. They were alive for at least the tail end if this. These guys could have known this shit!

So, yeah, the story here is not the mystery; it’s a lament for the web we lost.

D.B. Cooper

Again one I already knew, and I think they gave a good overview. Personally I’m in the camp of people who assume that he failed to make a safe landing.

Happy Valley Dream Survey

This seems vaguely interesting. One thing that kind of annoys me about this podcast is that they (well mostly Alfredo) generally assume that everything strange is necessarily nefarious, without any evidence. The whole thing here leads nowhere, after all.

Lead Masks Case

Again, I’m not sure how much weight to put on the other evidence they listed, especially that whole supposed UFO sighting. Yes, that one woman may have been very respected in her community and/or had a high social status, whatever that means. But the thing is that rich people who are super-involved in their church community or whatever can still (through no fault of their own) be unreliable witnesses and invent things that weren’t there, or not the way they were described.

Cicada 3301 (parts 1 and 2)

Personally I find this one less interesting because it’s not a mystery, it’s a riddle, and that’s way less fun. Much of the circumstances are weird enough, I guess.

What confuses me the most about this is how it’s supposed to be a recruitment tool, but it doesn’t seem to be very good at that. A lot of the steps don’t really seem to be that difficult and require just some fairly standard hacker skills. This is similar to the Satashi Nakamoto case, where one hint was „knows C++ programming“. Lots of people know that, and it’s something you can totally teach yourself. And if the people who were recruited through this were really supposed to program software, well… why did no part of this test whether they could do so? That’s a whole different skill. My conclusion is that this Cicada group is either a long con or a group that is nowhere near as smart as it thinks it is.

One thing to note here: They just casually assume that the FBI and NSA and so on are monitoring the whole internet, in real time, all the time. Which is true, we know that thanks to Edward Snowden. Isn’t that much more nefarious than any of the other mysteries here put together? How did we get to a place where Americans both think „this is the country that has all the freedom“ and „if you say or search for the wrong things you’ll get put on a government watchlist that’s just normal“ at the same time? Pervasive monitoring of a population is pretty much the exact opposite of freedom, but apparently we all in the western world just take it in stride anyway. That’s nothing to do with this podcast, though.

Conclusion

Generally okay podcast. The hosts are good storytellers, even if the stories are sometimes a bit shaky. It is at least at no point overly gross or insultingly stupid (unlike the official Rooster Teeth Podcast, which is both). So I think I can recommend it if you need something, anything to fill the quiet, and you’re already out of episodes of Black Box Down.

Reordberend

(part 21 of ?; first; previous; next)

(BTW, as of this update, Reordberend is, by my count, a little over 45k words long, putting it in the territory of a shortish novel. That also makes it one of the longest SF stories I’ve ever written. It’s not the most popular thing I’ve ever posted on Tumblr, but it has gotten a steady trickle of notes. Knowing there are people out there who enjoy your work, even if it’s fairly niche, is the best motivation there is to keep writing. Thank you for reading!)

Katherine Alice Green The Guest Room in the Village Hall The High Settlement McMurdo Dry Valleys ANTARCTICA

to Dr. Eunice Valerie Gordon Trinity College Dublin Dublin 2 IRELAND

Dear Dr. Gordon,

I am writing yet another letter I won’t be able to send, which, I realize might make me seem like kind of a crazy person. The only defense I can plead, I guess, is that the perpetual darkness of the winters here does funny things to you if you’re not used to it, and I’ve had a lot of down time lately that I need to do something productive with. I have already written to my parents, to a couple of friends, and to my cat, which leaves only you. And these letters seem to have a way of focusing my thoughts, so maybe it’s not an entirely useless exercise.

Where to begin? Well, first of all, I’m alive. That may come as a surprise. It occured to me not long after I was marooned here that perhaps nobody knows that. No one has come looking for me, and why would they? If any rescue parties did go looking for the Albatross, I doubt they’d come this far south. Not in winter. But I did in fact survive the ship going down. I don’t think anybody else did. The Dry Valleys People didn’t find anyone else on the shore, alive or dead. I try not to think about that too much, but, to be honest, it still has me kind of fucked up.

Oh, that’s the other things. I’ve made contact with the Dry Valleys People. I am, as the return address indicates, currently living with them. They have welcomed me, rather reluctantly, and I’ll be able to remain at least until the first sunrise of spring. This was not necessarily a widely popular decision, and I’ve come to learn that the political situation among the DVP is rather complicated. They have always guarded their isolation and their independence, and they’re keen to keep guarding it in the future, but there are some among them who worry how long that will really be possible. I think this is something Dr. Wright foresaw, and tried to warn them about in the letter he sent with me. But as you might expect, this is something a large part of their community doesn’t want to hear or even think about, and my presence here is definitely fraught.

As for my original mission… well, it’s an unqualified success, despite the difficulties. I’ve learned a lot. The language, to start with. You won’t believe this, but they speak Old English here. No, not thee and thou and maketh yon Old English. Not Chaucer, even. Older. From their books and what they’ve told me, their ancestors used the West Saxon dialect of Old English, as spoken about the year 1000 AD, as the basis for the language they taught their children. Dr. Wright knew this, of course. That’s how he was able to communicate them and win their trust; he showed an affinity for the same history and the same long-term perspective they cared about. If it seems weird that a bunch of people would move to Antarctica, forsake almost every modern convenience, and deliberately teach their kids a dead language that would be useless in the wider world, well, all I can say I guess is that humans have done a lot of weird shit for a lot of weird reasons throughout history. I think I am beginning to understand why the ancestors of the DVP did what they did. Some of them have tried to explain it to me, but there is a gap in our worldviews here that is difficult to bridge.

One of the DVP that I have befriended is a poet named Leofric. His sister, Leofe, taught me the language, but I’ve learned a lot more about their literature from him. It’s primarily an oral literature, although they do write some of it down. They like long, semi-narrative poetry that draws heavily on the imagery of the natural world, and I would say that it owes something to the ancient Anglo-Saxon poetry they keep in their books, except that, of course, the environment here is nothing like the environment of England one thousand years ago. But there are still some poetic traditions they have inherited from those earlier examples. For instance, their world is harsh, and unforgiving, and from a certain angle looks like a world in decline. The ancient English (so I am told) were surrounded by great Roman ruins they spoke of as being the work of metaphorical giants; here, they have the ruins of two hundred years of scientific and industrial exploration of the Antarctic coast. And their world, too, is enclosed by a vast cold sea, although this one has penguins in it at least.

Aside from the language, the founders of the DVP don’t seem to have intended to recreate medieval English society. There are no kings. There is a semi-formal system of village headship by seniority, but the social hierarchy is very flat. Marriage, inheritance, and choice of occupation all take place on fairly egalitarian terms, and their strictest taboos surround the sharing of labor and resources, not sexuality or religion. I wonder how much of their customs are the result of gradual cultural evolution, or some deliberate effort at creating a planned community. There are lots of funny Utopian experimental communities out there, but most tend to fail after a generation. In a way, this one couldn’t fail, because they had no way to leave Antarctica. They had to make it work. Is this what a real utopian project looks like after six or seven generations?

But honestly, one of the most fascinating aspects of the DVP is their material culture. As you might expect, their day-to-day existence is profoundly shaped by the environment they live in. Their houses are all heavy stone, designed to trap scarce heat, and arranged around the village halls as a windbreak against the dry katabatic gales that sweep the McMurdo Valleys clear of ice. Despite this being one of the driest locations on Earth, it’s still a better habitat for them than the glaciers of the Antarctic lowlands, or the rough, icy terrain of the mountains--here, you can actually build, and you don’t need skis and snowshoes to get around. But, as a consequence, much of their most important infrastructure is underground.

I don’t know if the ancestral DVP brought the right tools with them or if they scavenged them once here, but they have accumulated a small stockpile of laser borers, ultrasonic chisels, and crystalsteel digging equipment that they use to carve out underground chambers in the hills as meeting places and ritual sites. But they don’t do their agriculture there; that happens in networks of buried trenches just below the villages, where they grow cold-resistant mosses and lichens to supplement a meat-based diet, and what seems to be a form of genegineered fibergrass they use to weave their clothing and tapestries, and to make books.

Their art is very beautiful. Their coats, books, and tapestries--even their stone carvings--all depict elaborate lineate forms of plants and animals, inherited I suppose from ancestral memory, since none of the organisms in question are found in Antarctica. They also make images depicting the mountains, of course, and the sea, and the animals that live on the coast; even some of the coastal settlements, as seen from far off. They’re often abstracted, but these images are geographically grounded: they’re not just “generic mountains” or “generic coastline,” they’re specific mountains, specific coastlines, and they add up--if you are exposed to them every day of your life growing up--to something like a conceptual map of all of Victoria Land. It seems that if you dropped an average adult DVP individual anywhere from Oates Land to the Queen Elizabeth Range, they could probably find their way home, even during the dark months of winter.

(Oh! And the dark months! You’d think they’d be depressing, but I never imagined in my life I would see such a sight as the aurora australis, or even the clear polar stars! I can’t describe it to you. Maybe Leofric could, if I could do justice to his verse.)

They’re very communitarian, and great emphasis is placed on making sure no one goes without, but the price of that is, apparently, extremely elaborate dispute-resolution mechanisms; for a culture without courts, government, or attorneys, they are remarkably bureaucratic. Each physical object seems to have its own laws attached to it. Some may be shared by all objects of that type--for instance, if you need an electric firestarter, you always go to the house windward of yours to ask if they have one. If they don’t, you go to the next, and so on; firestarters pass from house to house, as needed, but only in one direction. Other objects may have completely unique rules. There is a knife with an elaborately carved handle meant to be used only by left-handed people. I don’t know why; nobody I asked knew, either. But that was the custom, and it was scrupulously obeyed. As a rule, the more elaborately decorated an object, the more particular the rules associated with it, but the elaboration of the object doesn’t seem to connote anything about the rules. It only marks it out as somehow special. The rules themselves are transmitted orally. All of these rules at bottom are about making sure that resources are evenly distributed--making sure nobody has to walk too far in bitterly cold weather to find a firestarter, for instance--and even the ones that don’t make sense now probably were created for good reason. For instance, the southpaw knife. Their knives for carving meat all have handles that curve in one way, to help separate flesh from bone, and I suspect that one is the result of a left-handed steelsmith getting fed up with with tools he couldn’t use very well. The blade is that of a carving-knife, though the handle attached to it is straight. The handle was probably later replaced when it broke, and somebody needed the knife for a different purpose--but the custom attached to it remained the same.

This system of sharing is, if anything, even more scrupulously observed when there’s a windfall. We went on a salvage expedition a month ago and brought back some much-needed supplies, and they spent days working out what would go where, first to each village and then, once we got back to the High Settlement, each house in each village--and even then, this was just what went to who first. Anything that’s not a finite supply, like food, will get passed from house to house. Leofric tells me that a few years ago, a whale--an entire blue whale, actually--beached itself to the north, and they had to have a weeklong assembly (on the beach, next to the whale, natch) to decide what do with every scrap of meat and bone. They still talk about the arguments that went down at the Whale Parliament sometimes (for which their word is hwaelthing, by the way. Literally it means exactly what it looks like: “whale-thing.”). Funny thing is, they also very carefully manage arguments in these discussions. That’s not normally the case--if two people have an argument and what to physically fight each other about it, that’s considered their business. But when it comes to disputes about food or metal or tools, everybody is very keen to show how Not Mad they are, even if they’re actually seething about it on the inside. And if voices get raised, people get hustled aside, and the whole matter is dropped completely until everybody has a chance to calm down. This looks like a system that was either deliberately designed to keep fights from breaking out and feelings getting permanently hurt, or one that sprung up after some nasty experiences of actual fights. I suspect the latter. It’s all very informal, but there’s a lot of social pressure that enforces it. The price for division and discord in an environment this hard to live in would be death, and I think all their social institutions are built around that reality.

I will admit, this has not been the easiest experience. I mean, there’s the almost dying part, and the part where all my cybernetics are broken, and I had a bad bout of something flulike a few weeks ago and almost died again, but I don’t actually mean the physical hardship. It is a more isolating experience than I thought it would be, being the lone outsider in such a close-knit community. Everyone knows everybody and everything, except me. They all have their own jokes and stories and long-running feuds, and they can communicate a great deal to one another with just a glance, and I’m left wondering what just happened when everybody laughs at something, or a fight breaks out. I have struggled sometimes to learn the language. I mean, I’ve had no other choice, and it’s amazing what you can learn when your survival depends on it, but even now I still sometimes find myself struggling to communicate ideas, or staying silent even when there is something I might want to say, just because I can’t find the words. It’s infuriating not being able to express yourself well, and maybe for good reason I sometimes think they all see me as this hapless idiot who almost got herself killed, who they have to put up with until the spring as a result.

Okay, I mean, I kind of am that. But I am also genuinely interested in their society, in the DVP as individuals, in their stories and their history. But I feel like the best I can hope for is being kind of a mascot. Or a well-meaning but dim-witted pet. A Labrador or something.

Not that I haven’t made friends. I would say Leofric is a friend. The salvagers--Eadwig and Andrac--they’re friends. And I seem to have won at least the grudging toleration of the ones like Aelfric who initially wanted to leave me to die. But sometimes I think I’ve made a connection, somehow bridged the unbridgeable gulf between my life experience and the world of the DVP, only to find out I’ve done no such thing. I thought Leofe was a friend; but now she’s not speaking to me, and she’s left the High Settlement for one of the other valleys. I don’t know why, and the others just shrug when I ask them.

Ugh. This is turning into whining. Now I know I’ll never send it. Sorry. It’s been a long day. It’s amazing how tired you can get when your muscles can’t rely on your augs to help them do shit.

But I need to find a way to bridge that gap. I mean really bridge it. Because I feel like I’m starting to understand something the DVP aren’t ready to hear. Their ancestors came to Antarctica at a time when the rest of the world wasn’t much interested in it. It was a wasteland, so sure, let’s treat it as an international, shared territory. Nobody goes there but scientists and the occasional tourist. And during the Collapse, not even that--Antarctica was truly empty for the first time in a hundred and fifty years when the ancestors of the DVP came to its shores. But it isn’t anymore. And it won’t ever be a real wasteland again. Every year the mining consortia move a little further down the Transantarctic Mountains. Every year a new outpost pops up on the coast, more ships come to Port Alexander, more icebreakers cut through the polar sea. Antarctica is warmer now that it’s been at any time in the past. Heck, without some global warming, I don’t think the Dry Valleys would be habitable. But that means more exposed rock, more open ground to build on, more people coming to the continent to work on the mining platforms or the offshore factories, and one day, I think, they’re going to come here.

What will the DVP do when that happens? This isn’t North Sentinel Island, which nobody ever goes to because there’s no reason. There’s gold in the hills here--the DVP make jewelry out of it--and maybe other precious metals, and you could build a geothermal station on Mount Erebus and power a small town, if you wanted to build some autofactories. The Antarctic Authority exists to promote “science and industry,” but with a big emphasis on industry. And by science they mostly mean, like, watching penguins bone and building telescopes at the South Pole. Not soft stuff like anthropology. And certainly not protecting three valleys full of cessionist oddballs whose parents had an unreasonable fondness for dead languages.

I think Dr. Wright knew this. I think maybe he tried to warn the DVP when he was here, but back then the danger was even further away. And it’s hard to get people to pay attention to danger that seems far away, even if it might be an existential threat. And when dealing with that danger would require you to completely change the only life you’d ever known… well, that’s a hard sell. The DVP don’t really like change. I can’t blame them. But one day things are going to change here, and if they’re not prepared for it, it could get really ugly, really fast. It’s one thing to shut yourself away when the world is ignoring you. It’s another when the world comes knocking.

If I think I can persuade them, I’m going to talk to the elders here, Aelfric and Wulf. Some of the DVP have had very fleeting contact with outsiders before me. I think one of them should come with me in the spring, as a sort of emissary. I’m not sure who they should talk to, yet. Maybe the Authority. Maybe somebody in Port Alexander’s local government? Or maybe we should just try to tell their story directly to the world. That might bring the DVP more attention than they’d like, but better a little good attention now than a lot of bad attention later. I would have asked Leofe--she’s smart, she’s tough, she could handle the culture shock--but that’s not an option now. Something to think about, anyway.

Well. I hope this letter finds the imaginary version of you well, my love to the imaginary family &c, hope the undergrads aren’t giving you too much trouble this year. If for some reason you do find this letter--like I freeze to death on my way to the weather station in September and they find this document on my corpse--please forgive my stubbornness, my insistence on going on this stupid trip, and any worry I’ve caused you as a result. And if I really am dead, please tell everybody I died doing something badass, like, I dunno, fighting a polar bear. I guess those are extinct and they never lived in Antarctica anyway, but something along those lines. Make it good.

All the best,

Kate

VLD6x01 – “Omega Shield”

6x01 – “Omega Shield”

Last episode ended with a significant conclusion, and this episode picks up immediately, following up on that conclusion (which makes the lack of a similar pick up at the beginning of 5x05 “Bloodlines” from the events at the Kral Zera feel more jarring since this episode shows they can write appropriate transitions at the start of an episode to connect to the previous episode).

The Castle Ship is returning to Zarkon’s old ship/base, and in front of everyone, Lotor offers a lot of praise for Allura’s actions. She thanks him in return for helping her learn of Oriande. And of course, the show has Lance jealous of Allura. Since the show eventually has Lotor revealed as a villain all along, it makes Lance’s jealousy in response to Lotor since 5x01 “The Prisoner” to be right. The show justifies his jealousy as him correctly interpreting Lotor’s spoken support of Allura as being villainous. I am not okay with the show having this message that it’s right for a person to be jealous of someone because they’re attracted to them, and that that jealousy is a valid indicator that the jealous person correctly understands a situation while the person they’re jealous about does not.

We’re introduced to Dayak, Lotor’s former governess. She’s strict, and it’s played for humor. I’ll admit I love the look on Lotor’s face and the tonal quality of his voice when he sees Dayak. I also really like that he refers to the Paladins as his “colleagues;” it sounds genuine and contributes to my inability to read him as villainous. We also get a bit of world-building: before the Galra were spacefaring, they used the title “Blood Emperor.”

Dayak is super proud of Lotor, especially with him becoming emperor, and it’s actually kind of a sweet moment. Lance reacts by taunting Lotor, “She raised you from a child? Awe, is this your nanny?” Uh, Lance, were you not paying attention: Lotor did identify Dayak as his governess. Governess isn’t some weird, alien concept. I actually kind of don’t mind Dayak whacking Lance with her crop. (I just did a tiny bit of research and learned that a crop used in the manner that Dayak is so doing is actually called a “swagger stick.” Swagger seems quite right.)

Hunk decides he’s interested in learning more about Galra society, and Dayak is only willing to teach him if Hunk subjects himself to her rigorous standard.

The show gives us an update on the civil war. Sendak is apparently being very successful in winning support. Lance asks Lotor if he’s going to start freeing planets, and Lotor counters, “It’s not that easy. My grip on the Empire is tenuous as is. I need to proffer an alternative to our current state.” He’s not wrong. Long-lasting change in government and political institutions do not happen quickly. This is why I think a lot of us read Lotor as being genuine and why the show ending his character by saying he was a villain all along is so jarring. He is demonstrating an understanding of social change that is proven accurate given our real history, so it seemed like the show was using Lotor to depict that reality (and maybe even educate viewers). No character other than Lotor has ever presented this nuanced, detailed understanding that to change Galra culture would take a lot more than just killing Zarkon.

Dayak says that “for the mind to learn, the body must be broken.” I can’t agree with that, but this is mostly played for humor so it’s not that bad of a claim in this context. She gives us a history lesson. “The Galra race started as a nation tribe on planet Daibazaal, home to many warring races at the time.” I wonder about the show is using the word “race” here. As we humans in the real world have come to understand (or at least some of us understand), race is a social construct, not something that’s biological. So, I’m wondering if the show truly means the word “race” here or if they mean the word “species.” It’s not an uncommon trope in science fiction to have some alien world result in multiple intelligent species who are in conflict with one another, often with one conquering/destroying the other(s). If she does mean the word race the same as how we use it to reference groups within the same species, then this is an indication that racism has been a fundamental part of Galra culture since apparently the beginning of the Galra.

Vrepet Sa, she tells us, means “killing thrust,” derived from an army combat tactic. She also says that if Hunk abandons her lessons, it is considered an insult to her teaching, and thus she is required to respond by fighting him to the death. This, again, is played for humor.

Lotor tells Allura that if they’re going to be able to get his ships able to enter the rift, she’ll “have to replicate [her] father’s work.” She has no idea how to do that. He tells her that it’ll have to come from “something she learned in Oriande.” Of course, we’re never shown her learning anything. We weren’t shown her learning anything (other than to accept being attacked and potentially killed) there, and I don’t think the show ever shows us that she’s learned anything as this plotline progresses. The show skips that step and just has her be successful in applying alchemy to Lotor’s ships. This is just another manifestation of the show’s lack of definition to its magic system.

Lotor gives his address to the whole of the Galra Empire. He refers to himself as a “slayer of a tyrant.” It’s again hard for me to see him as some deceptive villain with him proclaiming to the entirety of the Empire that Zarkon was a tyrant who needed to be stopped.

We are introduced to a new Galra base, one of the many shown watching the transmission of Lotor’s speech. This base is on a planet that periodically moves through what one Galra calls a “radiation belt” but is animated like it’s a solar flare. they have a shield (one that is small compared to the planet-wide one we saw used on Naxzela) to protect the base from the radiation. While they wait for the radiation belt to pass, the lieutenant complains to the commander about the speech, hoping the commander is not considering joining with Lotor. The lieutenant also has a problem with the idea of the Empire becoming peaceful. The commander is a traditionalist, calling down the lieutenant and cites that Lotor lit the flame of the Kral Zera.

This entire base is contrived. I’m willing to entertain the idea that there’s something of very notable value that would result in the Galra creating this base here, but I don’t have even a clue what that is. So, it makes no sense to me that they would choose this planet rather than some other nearby one that’s not subject to periodic exposure to this radiation belt. The entire premise of this base, narratively, is to create the need for help and Lotor to demonstrate his validity as leader. As the commander goes to send a message to Lotor, Sendak shows up with a fleet and starts blowing up buildings on the planet.

The show then again uses its jarring style of juxtaposing humor scenes in between dramatic moments. It is possible to write humor moments within dramatic scenes, but this show doesn’t do that, at least not successfully. Their humorous scenes that are interspersed within a larger, dramatic narrative only has the effect of disrupting that narrative’s attempt to build tension. Hunk’s scene is thankfully short lived before we return to the main plot.

Lotor identifies the planet that Sendak is attacking as being a “labor planet,” which to me sounds like a euphemism for a prison, but I guess it could be a location primarily made up of industrial facilities. The show never elaborates. Either way, it’s still senseless that they would build this base where this radiation belt would be a frequent, repetitive problem.

I don’t buy into this being a dilemma for Lotor, who says, “Sendak would have me respond to his attack and neglect my empire.” Is this planet not part of Lotor’s empire? Wouldn’t responding to Sendak be him attending to, not neglecting the Empire? Allura proposes Voltron handling Sendak, saying “Voltron can handle this while you continue to rule.” That doesn’t make any sense. Dealing with threats like this is part of ruling. This weird ignorance of what constitutes being the head executive of a government in this scene is baffling. There’s nothing wrong with Voltron being sent to respond, but the idea that Lotor responding to Sendak is somehow Lotor abandoning ruling the Empire is totally senseless.

On the way to the base (and I note that only the Lions are going, not the Castle Ship because wouldn’t want to have to actually show the Castle Ship being used the way it used to be used in the first two seasons of the show), Shiro undergoes some distress. He can even be heard a little over their communication. The Lions wormhole to the Galra base.

Meanwhile, Haggar has arrived at the white hole. She orders her ship to “stay on course” heading into the white hole, despite Axca saying if they go any further that the ship will lose power. Haggar’s facial markings glow, and Shiro is again shown visually and audibly in distress. Lance can hear him and asks if he’s alright, and Shiro says he is. It didn’t seem like Haggar was trying to psychically access Shiro in that moment, so why this whole moment happens, I have no idea. Haggar’s facial markings glowing, per the lore last episode, indicates she has the “mark of the chosen.” Chosen by whom, and why would Haggar be chosen? What are the qualifications a person must meet to be “chosen?” The show never answers this.

Voltron forms. Sendak decides to taunt the Paladins over their caring for others (he’s exploiting the same supposed vulnerability he identified of the Paladins way back in the first season on Arus), and he has his ship fire on the base’s shield, which he damages. “The entire planet is doomed,” the base lieutenant says. It’s supposed to be dramatic, but it just feels contrived because, again, the show has not provided any justification for why this base/labor planet facility has to exist on this particular planet. Sendak then orders his fleet to withdraw.

Shiro declares they need to fix the shield, but then he recoils in pain again and seemingly sees the pyramid on Oriande. Allura asks if Shiro is okay, and he continues to insist that they need to tend to the base. I love that Shiro identifies Hunk as being the one they need to listen to for a team plan. This moment makes me think of season one Shiro, who would often turn to other characters for their respective expertise. This is a great depiction of skillful leadership.

There are three tasks Voltron has to get done to remedy the situation. Hunk assigns working on the generator to Pidge, who needs Shiro’s help. He assigns dealing with the fractured shielding plate to Lance and Allura. And Hunk himself works to put drifting plates back into position. This latter seems more like plain manual labor style effort, which doesn’t quite make sense for Hunk to be doing. I would think, since he’s functioning as an engineer in devising a response plan, that he would be directly working with technology, not just moving it around. The show needs Lance and Allura’s respective Lions’ abilities for dealing with the crack, so without Hunk mentioning that as part of his assignments, it makes his assigning Lance and Allura to that task while he just moves things around a bit contrived. Only a very slight revision to his dialog, letting him point out the necessity of Lance and Allura’s Lions to dealing with the crack, would have fixed this.

The lieutenant on the base decides literally in the middle of the crisis while the base commander is working to try to bring the shield back online as the time to turn against him. Can this show please stop writing characters like they have such a lack of sense that it overrides their desire for survival? There is no reason the lieutenant would mutiny against the commander now while the base is in danger of soon being destroyed. Once the base is safe, maybe, but now? No.

It seems like the whole moment is contrived so that Hunk can yell at them to fulfill the supposed education he was getting from Dayak. While I do actually kind of like how this is simultaneously humorous and the resolution to a dramatic moment, and I like Hunk gaining something from his time with Dayak (so that those scenes weren’t just humor), it only happens because the show writes the lieutenant to behave so unrealistically. There is a little bit of outsider-as-savior trope applied, having Hunk demonstrating more supposed understanding of Galra culture than Galra themselves, that sort of taints the moment though.

Pidge and Shiro enter into the depths of the shield base to access the base’s systems. Hunk says that if the shield plates are “even one degree off, the shield will fail.” That’s a level of precision that does not feel realistic, and they could have easily left that particular claim out of the episode, and I wish they had. Allura proposes Lance hold pieces of the cracked plate in place while she uses Blue’s ice cannon to bind the pieces together. And then Lance adds the idea of using Red’s fire cannon to weld the plates together after they’ve been frozen in place. That makes the ice step of the process seem unnecessary, just get to welding. (Also, again, this whole plan of action with Allura and Lance should have been Hunk’s idea.)

Lance then takes Allura’s compliment and jumps into his jealousy, trying to replicate some of content of the dialog he heard from Lotor toward Allura at the beginning of the episode. I swear, this show seems to be unable to help itself when it writes Lance to behave like this while in the middle of crises. It’s so annoying.

The Yellow Lion spontaneously grows new abilities (without any use of Hunk’s bayard to activate it) and without any acknowledgement by any character, including Hunk. It makes this development have zero emotional or dramatic weight. (EDIT: Thanks to lostchasingsilver for pointing out to me that this upgrade Hunk uses here is the same one he used in 2x06 “The Ark of Taujeer,” just without claws. I didn’t remember that upgrade including a booster engine. Also, thanks to lostchasingsilver for pointing out that Lion upgrades do not use the bayard, just Voltron upgrades. It feels dissonant for one set of upgrades to use a bayard while the other doesn’t, but that’s how it happens.)

Pidge and Shiro are still working inside the base. Shiro winces, and he sees Haggar touching the floor with a glyph glowing under her in the room with the giant statues in the pyramid on Oriande. Haggar would seem to be fighting the statues. There is no explanation for how/why Shiro is able to see what Haggar is doing. There’s also no explanation for how Haggar has been allowed, not just inside Oriande, but inside the white hole. I guess the show thinks that having Haggar able to overcome the White Lion demonstrates that she’s such a huge threating villain for the story, but it makes the White Lion as a guardian last episode seem pointless. It makes Allura’s willingness to accept being attacked and potentially harmed by the White Lion lose significance and meaning.

The shield plates are restored, Pidge reboots the base’s power systems. The shield starts to function. Shiro then sees the White Lion as if it is attacking him, causing him to recoil his hand from the panel he was powering, sending the shield offline again. Energy from the cracked plate begins to spark, and Lance assumes that it’s going to jet out and hit the Blue Lion, so he pilots Red to knock Blue out of the way. Red gets hit by energy that looks like just big electricity (you’re telling me that the Lions can handle being hit by laser blasters, but electricity can mess them up?), and Lance seems to be electrocuted in the process. Allura immediately jumps out of Blue and jetpacks over to Red (how about just using Blue to pull Red to safety?). Allura’s voice conveys how distraught she is over the idea that Lance was injured.

This Allura and Lance moment feels very contrived to me, artificial to let her have this reaction. The problem for me is that this is such a big moment in the development of their relationship that it should have been given the narrative space to occupy the narrative entirely, not have to fit it in with other simultaneous developments of other plots. By not giving it due space, it feels rushed.

Hunk moves to try to restore the cracked plate.

Shiro is not able to do anything, clearly wincing in significant pain. Pidge grabs Shiro and tries to pull him back to the panel.

Allura touches Lance’s helmet, both Allura’s and Lance’s bodies glow and Red’s eyes also glow.

Pidge gets Shiro’s hand on the panel in the clichédly last second. Can writers please stop acting like literal last second success actually feels like success and not cheap writing?

Lance regains consciousness.

Later, the base commander and lieutenant thank Hunk “for reminding [them] what it means to be Galra.” Sigh.

On their return trip, Hunk is sleeping.

Shiro meanwhile looks exhausted. He winces again and sees Haggar walking out of the pyramid with sparkling dots floating around her. She pulls back her hood and regains her Honerva appearance. The music makes the moment confusing. I don’t know if the episode expects me to feel unnerved by her villainous success, or if I’m supposed to think she’s restored herself to some pre-quintessence poisoning true-self.

The most significant development to the story this episode is the Haggar plot, yet those moments are given the least amount of time and explanation. Haggar’s part in this episode totally overshadows everyone else in the episode, with he exception of Shiro since he is how we’re given this information about Haggar. The absolute lack of explanation about what’s going on with Shiro really bothers me.

It’s also really bothering that Lance and Allura both had heard Shiro wincing in pain at points in the episode, and then Pidge literally sees Shiro in pain so severe that she has to pull him into position and put his hand on the panel, yet the episode ends without any of them talking to him about what was happening to him. Friends do not ignore their supposed friend when they literally hear and see that supposed friend in pain, but apparently they do on this show.

Lotor’s claimed inability to respond to Sendak because he has to rule the Empire was senseless, Allura and Lance’s moment was rushed (at best), Shiro was subject to suffering without anyone who’se supposed to care about him following up on knowing it happened, and Haggar is, without explanation, more powerful than ancient, almost spiritual, super magical, otherworldly defenses. The basic ideas of the episode are good, but the production of those ideas into a finished product needs more work.

Okay! The main one I can remember was Werewolf vs. Vampire. Little known werewolf habits/symptoms. Did Campion being a werewolf affect his relationship with the woman in Dancers in Mourning? I can't remember if you address that, clearly I need to reread. Also I'm just feeling Christmassy and wondered if you've thought about Campion At Christmas. I realized I'm not sure how they celebrated back then.

You’ve given me a lot of different things to think about here, so bear with me while I ramble on for a bit…

In the (stupidly long) time since I’ve updated my werewolf!Campion series, I’ve actually done quite a lot of writing (I know, I know, where’s the proof?) and spent even more time ruminating on various aspects of werewolfiness with respect toCampion’s canon-adventures: what’s changed for him, and what bits of werewolf lore am I keeping for his story. A few of these happen to be VERY plot relevant for Mr. Campion’s War, so I won’tnecessarily go into them in great detail here, but a few tidbits:

- Real wolves are pack animals and large percentage of their communication is physical in nature or scent-based; humans are social creatures that also need a certain amount of touch/physicality in their interactions to thrive; werewolves tend to be much more tactile than youraverage repressed English gentleman of the early 20th century and considerably more invested in how things smell. Albert Campion is no exception, though he has a great deal of upper class socialization telling him that no, he can’t just grab people and / or sniff them, no matter what his instincts are screaming at him.

Before being cursed, Campion dealt with his insecurities / social discomfort via inane chatter - make people laugh and they’ll underestimate him or look for another target. (He spent a lot of time at school being bullied before he learned this trick.) After, he’s not much different, though large crowds tend to make him more anxious and prone to make himself politely invisible. But if you’re one of the few people he considers part of his inner circle, he’s much less physically reserved than before. (This was actually the aspect of Campion’s transformation that Lugg found the strangest. People, least of all Albert bloomin’ Campion, do not tend to hug Magersfontaine Lugg. Not unless one or both of them is dying. It’s weird for both of them, but it gets less so over time.)

- As far asCampion’s inner wolf is concerned, Lugg, Amanda, Oates, Guffy &Mary Randall, Hal Fitton, Val, Uncle Avril and later Charlie Luke and Rupert are part of his pack.

- Alcohol has almost no effect on him. The super high metabolism that allows Campion to heal rapidly and shape shift also means his body tends to process alcohol before he feels any intoxicating effects. Helpful when he’s trying to drink a suspect under the table, less helpful when certain poisons actually effect him faster than they ordinarily would. (Thank goodness for his fast healing.) This makes the events near the end of Death of a Ghost rather more harrowing when he discovers the mad combination of spirits the villain plies him with are having a deleterious effect on him almost too late.

- Speaking of that high metabolism - rationing for WWII actually makes things rather uncomfortable for Mr. Campion, as he can’t exactly explain to anybody with authority that he really needs to be issued enough coupons for two people. He ends up sort of solving this problem by supplementing his diet by shifting on non-full moon nights when he can and going hunting in the countryside as a wolf. It gets a bit tricky though, as every shift is a massive calorie expenditure, meaning he risks creating a net loss for himself if his hunting isn’t successful enough. (Not to mention he’s not always stationed somewhere safe enough to venture out in wolf-form or the risk of being caught ‘poaching’ afterwards.) Campion spends most of the war irritable, hungry, and underweight.

- That said, there are absolutely advantages to being a spy who can shape shift.

- Cats and horses hate Campion now, to the extent that some of his friends (who don’t know why these animals have taken an instant dislike to him) tease him about it. Dogs are either extremely wary of him or instantly his best friend, with very little in between.

- Campion had to falsify paperwork to avoid a government physical. Fortunately, he knows more than a few people in the right professions who owe him a favour or two. He’s avoided eye exams and medical check ups entirely since becoming a werewolf, mostly out of an overabundance of caution. He’s never sick and orders replacement spectacles from a theatre supplier.

- His eyes shine green instead of red in photographs taken with a heavy flash, but this really isn’t a problem until later in his life when colour photography becomes more commonplace.

- His normal body temperature runs hotter than most people’s, which is handy when waking up naked outdoors on a chilly English winter morning, miserable when riding the tube during a sweltering London heat wave.

- Is Campion’s lycanthropy contagious? If say, he were to bite someone, would they then become a werewolf too? Ahahaha. Stay tuned on this one, as it will be addressed in Mr. Campion’s War. Minor spoilers, it is inheritable, as Rupert Campion discovers to his dismay upon reaching puberty.

- Are there other supernatural creatures in Mr. Campion’s world? Other werewolves maybe? Yep. More than you’d think. Not gonna say who just yet. ;)

- His relationship with Linda Sutane (the woman in Dancers in Mourning) is largely unchanged by him being a werewolf, other than his enhanced senses making it much more obvious to him how mutual their attraction was (very). He still didn’t act on it, though he very much wanted to, and they parted as friends in the end. (The scene in Dancers in Mourning where he goes for a long walk through London to try to suppress his feelings for her very nearly ends in him stripping off his clothes and going wolf for a while until he manages to get a hold of himself.) This isn’t directly addressed in any of my stories, but it gets alluded to a little in Mr. Campion’s Secret and Mr. Campion’s Snarl.

- Christmas wasn’t celebrated all that differently then than today I think - dinners with family, presents, etc. The holiday actually only gets a couple brief mentions in the novels - first in The Tiger in the Smoke, which takes place in late November 1950, and then The Mind Readers, which seems to take place in December 1965. The short stories are another matter: The Case is Altered takes place at a Christmas party Campion attends in, presumably, 1938, wherein he has an opportunity to play Santa. The Man With the Sack is set on Christmas Eve, 1936? The Snapdragon and the CID is explicitly set on Christmas day, but various bits of it are so wildly anachronistic to the established timeline, I have no idea what year it’s meant to be; it’s blatant holiday fluff though so who cares. If you haven’t already read them, I highly recommend the short stories. Campion works really well in that format and they’re quick reads.

Merry Christmas!

the tangled web of fate we weave

This is highly self-indulgent because I, an extremely stressed-out final-year history PhD student, needed extremely stressed out final-year history PhD student Lucy Preston and also Garcy, because I always need that. 

This is an unofficial sequel to this, where Flynn was the one to save Lucy from the car accident in her sophomore year. 

March 19, 2010

It’s Friday, and it’s the first time all week that Lucy Preston has seen the sunset. Possibly in two weeks, for that matter, or more. She has been shut up in the library since what feels like the start of the new year, buried in her carrel among an endless stack of books, articles, notes, photocopied primary sources, her overworked laptop, her three thumb drives (someone else in the department has a horror story about their computer dying five days before submission, and Lucy isn’t taking any chances), a rotation of takeout cups and sandwich wrappers from the library café, and whatever other sustenance she needs to keep going. She’s rented a campus studio apartment, otherwise she would probably be sleeping in the stacks in the basement. Be way too much hassle to try to commute back and forth to Mom’s house in Mountain View otherwise.

The Stanford campus is cool and blue and quiet, and Lucy leans against the outside library wall, rubbing her eyes and trying to get them to focus. They don’t seem to want to. She turned twenty-seven two months ago, and feels about eighty-one. It’s been a nonstop grind of work, from that moment she nearly died seven years ago, almost exactly to the day – that was the twenty-first of March, 2003, she’s never forgotten. Dumped Jake, abandoned her plans of joining a band, enrolled for junior year of history, finished, graduated, went straight onto her master’s degree that fall, and now, the fact that the end might actually be in sight is one Lucy cannot wrap her head around. It feels surreal and dreamlike.

Overachiever that she is, her PhD is being conferred jointly by two departments, history and anthropology, which means her dissertation is at least one and a half times longer than everyone else’s. She’s teaching HIST1210 on the Civil War and HIST1300 on primary sources, she still has papers to mark from both, and she needs to update her CV and apply for research funding for the conferences she submitted paper prospectuses to. And think, again, about the future. Even having a mother who basically invented the Stanford women’s studies department isn’t a guarantee that she’ll get a job, even if it does pitch her odds a lot better than most people’s. Lucy has already had most of her tuition paid by Carol Preston’s institutional pull, and she can’t help but wonder where the gravy train stops. She likes to think that she’s smart enough that she’d have earned scholarships on her own merit anywhere, but why go anywhere else, when it’s Stanford, for God’s sake? Not Jim Bob Jones Community College.

After a long pause, Lucy straightens up, swings her bag to her shoulder (she leaves most of her stuff in her carrel overnight) and starts down the path. She’s wondered if now might be an opportune moment to develop a drinking habit, but her anxious mind won’t let her. One near-fatal car crash was bad enough, after all. No need to push her luck with a second.

(She thinks again of the man who rescued her. Just dove in, no hesitation at all, and fished her out, told her not to quit history for a boy, and vanished. She never got a name.)

(Is he pleased, then, that she threw herself in headfirst? Is that what he wanted? Not that it matters. Not that that is the reason she’s doing this.)

Lucy comes to a halt in front of the beige-stucco residence halls and digs for her keys, wondering how obnoxious her neighbors feel like being tonight. This is postgrad housing, supposedly quiet, but the way they go at it, you’d think it was undergraduate party central. Lucy has been over to bang on their door at 1AM a few times, and she could complain to the office, but – again, Lucy Good Girl Preston – she shirks from the idea of actually getting anyone in trouble. She’ll be out of here soon anyway, moving on. She can endure it, she can –

“Good evening, Lucy.”

She almost has a heart attack. Drops her keys and fumbles for them madly in the dimness, having some panicky idea that it’s someone jumping out of the bushes to put a bag over her head and drag her off behind a dumpster. Yes, it seems odd to politely address her by her first name beforehand, but who knows? It’s a man’s voice, gravelly and accented, almost familiar. But it’s been at least two years between boyfriends, it’s not any of her professors (and it would be more than a little creepy to follow her home) and –

She whirls around, gets a good look at his face in the portico light, and feels momentarily faint. She was, of course, just thinking about him, and wonders half-seriously if she’s charmed up him up like a djinni. He looks exactly how she remembers: tall, dark hair, sharp-nosed profile, though this time he is not dripping wet, having not had to dramatically dive into the Bay to save her from her sinking car. He’s wearing the leather bomber jacket and a nice pair of jeans, has his thumbs linked casually through his belt like a Grease extra, but it comes off casually competent and slightly chilling. She also remembers what she thought about him last time, that instant response to high-pressure situations might be something he deals with a lot. What the –

“You,” she says at last, having managed to unstick her tongue from the roof of her mouth. “What are you doing here? How did you – how did you know where to find me?”

He has apparently been prepared to remind her how they know each other, but sees at once that he doesn’t have to. He shrugs. “I know people.”

That’s not exactly a reassuring answer. Lucy clutches her bag closer, as if he’s really come here for the $3.20 in her wallet and her backup thumb drives. “Have you been stalking me?”

He looks amused, but only briefly. “We should get inside.”

Lucy goggles at him, not least at his apparent presumption that she’s going to ask him into her house, but something makes her do as told. Hands trembling for no good reason, she taps her key card, buzzes them in, and climbs the stairs to her second-story apartment. She can hear the thumping of rap music before she even reaches the hallway – yep, her neighbors are at it again. Trying to ignore it, not least because she suddenly has bigger problems, she reaches into her bag for her phone, trying to dial a 9 and 1 without him noticing. But why would the man who saved her life want to kill her?

His eyes flick to her hand. “You don’t need to call the police, Lucy.”

“Don’t need to, or you would prefer that I didn’t?” Lucy refuses to budge. “There’s a difference.”

He looks admiring of her bravery, if irritated at the timing. “Don’t need to. Go inside, I’ll be along.”

Lucy debates dialing the last 1 with her thumb. Or campus security, they could probably get here faster. But – weird as this is, and as he is – something stops her. He slowly removes his hands from his belt and holds them up, then opens his jacket to show her that he isn’t packing heat inside. There is, however, a holster as if he usually does, and he reaches into his back pocket, pulls out a slim black case, and flips it open, holding it out. It’s a U.S. government ID. Gives his name as Garcia Flynn.

“Okay,” Lucy says, a little weakly. “Why didn’t you lead with that?”

Garcia Flynn doesn’t bother to answer this perfectly reasonable question, making another gesture at her apartment. Lucy goes inside, puts down her bag on the couch, and feels like collapsing onto it. Next door, the music continues unabated for a few more moments, until it abruptly cuts off. The silence is blessed, but suspicious. She hears voices, but can’t make out what they’re saying. Then her front door opens again, she jumps, and Flynn enters, looking smug. “That’s better.”

“You didn’t kill my neighbors, did you?” Lucy isn’t sure they wouldn’t deserve it, but that is obviously not a man she wants to be alone with. Not that she knows how he would kill three people in thirty seconds with no noise, but. . . it’s the sort of thing that doesn’t seem out of his ability. “Or – ”

“I didn’t kill anyone.” He seems somewhat aggravated that she keeps harping on this point. “I’m not here to hurt you, Lucy.”

Lucy remains looking at him tensely, but he returns her gaze forthrightly, and she finally lets out a whisper of a breath. “What’s going on?”

“That’s complicated.” Flynn is prowling around her living room, tapping and shaking things, picking them up and turning them over, in a way that seems – to say the least – out of line in a perfect stranger’s house. Maybe Lucy’s watched too many spy movies recently, switches on whatever looks halfway interesting on Netflix and vegs out, but it looks a lot like sweeping for bugs. He takes a small silver thing that looks like a coin out of his pocket and sets it on her bookshelf. “I’m not sure you’d understand.”

“I’m a PhD student,” Lucy says, voice brittle. “I’m pretty sure I’d understand.”

Flynn glances up at her, one eyebrow raised, but doesn’t answer. He presses something on the silver thing, which hums as if to disrupt any nearby listening equipment, and finally seems satisfied that her shithole student flat is in the clear. “So you kept up with history?”

“Yes. And I’m due to submit my dissertation in about two weeks, my supervisor is supposed to email me by Monday with my oral exam date, half the committee is from Harvard, and I just spent thirteen hours reading nineteenth-century handwriting. So you better make this quick.”

Flynn half-grins, seemingly despite himself. “A PhD at – what, twenty-seven,” he says. “That’s very impressive. You’ve worked hard.”

Lucy doesn’t want to accept the praise of a possibly crazy government operative, but it makes her glow, a little. Her mom always wants to know how much more she still has to do, as if keeping a timetable in her head and marking her off, and of course Amy is encouraging, but Lucy has kept her nose to the grindstone so long that she’s barely picked it up to look at the rest of the world. She doesn’t even know what she’s doing, other than that she has to do it. She does love history. She really does. You don’t get this far without it, and you have to enjoy the tedious parts (well, mostly), even if you’re re-reading your draft and shouting at your first-year self because they didn’t put in page numbers, thus obliging you to go grumbling to hunt them down. She is damn and justifiably proud of this accomplishment, and she doesn’t need anyone, much less FBI Freddy here, to tell her that. But still.

“Never mind that,” she says. “Why are you here?”

Flynn regards her for a long moment. Then he says, “Scientia potentia est. You’ve heard that?”

“It’s Latin,” Lucy says, a little shortly. She is not up for having a fright, and her time wasted, for something he could have typed into Google Translate. “It means knowledge is power.”

“Yes, I know that.” Flynn sits across from her, looking too big for her secondhand armchair. “It’s also a motto. Have you seen it anywhere?”

“No.” A phrase as banal as that could be a motto for dozens of private schools. “Mr. Flynn, I’m afraid I can’t – ”

“Very well.” He sits forward, gripping his knees. “Rittenhouse, Lucy. Have you ever heard of that?”

“Rittenhou – David Rittenhouse?” Lucy is vaguely familiar with him, a leading intellectual of the eighteenth century, polymath and professor of astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania, and correspondent and cohort of the Founding Fathers. Has Flynn come here to ask for help with some research project, some kind of sponsorship some historical society is doing to raise awareness of his life? That at least might make more sense. “Is that what we’re talking about?”

The expression on Flynn’s face seems to say that he momentarily isn’t sure. “So he founded it?”

“What?” Lucy gets up, not entirely sure that she isn’t asleep atop a stack of books back at her carrel, drooling on her notes. “Founded what?”

“The society in his name. Rittenhouse. Scientia potentia est. That’s their motto.”

“There is no society in his name. Unless you mean the astronomy club?”

“I don’t mean the astronomy club. The other one.”

“Is this a – ” Lucy isn’t sure what it would be, some extended performance-art practical joke, perhaps, but he doesn’t look like he’s trying to prank her. Besides, why would an eighteenth-century astronomer have anything to do with why Flynn wanted to sweep her apartment for bugs? “I work more on the nineteenth century than late colonial-early federal America, but if you have some kind of question about him, I can recommend someone in the department to – ”

“I’m not asking anyone else,” Flynn says brusquely. “I’m asking you.”

“Well then. You’re in the wrong place, I can’t help. I don’t have time.” Lucy gets up, pacing toward the kitchen. Flynn remains seated, but she can feel his eyes following her. She runs a glass under the tap and takes a drink, then returns to the living room, as if this will somehow have fixed the problem. “What do you want to know about him for? There’s Wikipedia, there’s whatever else, there’s – ”

“Nothing of what I want is available online.” He says this with the tone of somebody who’s looked – and NSA Nicky probably has. “You, though – I thought there was a chance you might. Given who your father is – ”

“What?” Lucy’s father died almost nine years ago. Lung cancer. The reason she won’t take up smoking either, that and the way her mother’s been coughing a lot and she’s urged her to get it checked out. She feels slapped. “My father’s dead.”

“Henry Wallace?” Flynn shakes his head. “No, not him. I meant your biological father.”

“What?”

He pulls a slip of paper out of his pocket and holds it out to her, but Lucy does not budge to take it. In a savage whisper, she says, “You need to leave.”

Flynn belatedly seems to realize that it might not have been the best time to bring this up. He opens his hand and lets the paper flutter onto the floor, but doesn’t move to retrieve it. He gets to his feet instead, eyes never wavering from hers. He is just so damn intense in everything he does, it makes Lucy feel like she’s on the inside of a forge, burning, burning. “Very well.”

With that, he starts across the floor, but seems reluctant to go entirely. Any other person would apologize for the intrusion, or tell her to be careful, but he doesn’t. “Ask your mother about your father,” he says. She can’t tell if his eyes are green or brown – in some lights they look one, in some lights the other. He looks at her challengingly. “Ask him if he is who you thought.”

Lucy’s about to respond, but just then, headlights waver on the ceiling through her half-closed curtains, and she looks down to see a car pulling into the parking lot. It’s the sort of nondescript black sedan that screams shady government business, and she might have thought it was Flynn’s ride, but after he strides to the window and looks out, his mouth goes very thin. He jerks the curtains shut, reaches into his jacket, and remembers he’s left his gun off in a bid not to alarm her. He swears in something that sounds Slavic; Lucy can’t be sure exactly what. It fits with the accent and appearance, but he had a U.S. badge – unless that was some kind of forgery and –

Flynn whirls back to the silver gizmo he has, switches it off, and pulls something else out of his jacket that kills the lights. Then he takes hold of Lucy – it feels much too forward, even as she remembers him pulling her out of the water – and tugs her flat on the floor. “Don’t open the door,” he hisses. “You’re not home.”

Lucy is about to struggle, to ask questions, but the look he gives her is so searing that she bites her tongue instead. She can hear footsteps on the stairs, then a knock on her door. “Miss Preston?” a voice calls. “It’s FedEx.”

She’s pretty sure it isn’t FedEx. She and Flynn lie close together on the floor, his arms still around her, the lights off and the apartment dark. Are they going to go look at the library next, or just assume she’s out having a life like an ordinary twenty-seven-year old woman would on Friday night? She tries to concentrate, to slow her breathing, as if they could hear it. The thump of Flynn’s heart seems distractingly loud, though her ear is pressed directly against his chest. He is so tall that if they were standing, her head would tuck easily under his chin. What is it about him and appearing out of nowhere to get her out of – or into – life-threatening situations?

The faux FedEx man knocks again. They don’t budge. Lucy has to admit, it is more than a little freaky that this has happened right after Flynn has turned up talking about secret societies and – whatever else, and it unwillingly makes her think that there might be something to his story. Oddest of all, however, is the fact that it almost feels familiar to lie next to him, not just because he saved her life. Like it’s something else, and she just has to remember what.

After a long pause and one last knock, the fake deliveryman departs. Flynn doesn’t let go of Lucy until several minutes after they’ve heard the car pull out, he’s looked through the window to make sure, and swears again. “That is the last time I leave my gun at home.”

Lucy sits up slowly, rattled. “Are you going to tell me that was Rittenhouse?”

“Might be.” Flynn speaks distractedly, eyes still on the parking lot. “I don’t suppose you carry?”

“I’m a history student.” Lucy has never wanted to touch a gun in her life, especially since she plans on being a professor. “No.”

“Of course.” His brow remains furrowed, as if he’s judging the advisability of leaving her alone long enough to go back and get his own. Finally he says, “I think it’s better for me to stay here tonight.”

Lucy opens her mouth to tell him that he can’t invite himself to stay the night, but the words get stuck. Despite herself, she is scared. Nonstop dissertation anxiety and crushing uncertainty about the academic job market almost seem preferable. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know.” Flynn turns slowly, the dim light from outside etching the sharp features of his face. “They could have guessed something about what I knew, or. . . I’m not sure. It could blow over, but I’d feel better about it to stay. Just for tonight.”

“And then what?” Lucy demands. “I can’t go into witness protection, just because of whatever stupid thing you got me into! I have to finish my dissertation!”

“You can do that, Lucy.” He looks at her frankly. “I’ll protect you.”

Whatever she is about to say withers on her tongue. After all, isn’t that what he did – the first time, and then now? She doesn’t know what’s going on, he has been an enigma in a bomber jacket ever since she met him – seven years ago, technically, does it count to have known him for seven years, if it’s only been one night and this one? That did freak her out. As strange and unwise as it might be, she would in fact feel better if he stayed. Not that her sagging yellow-plaid couch, older than her, which she picked up at a garage sale for $12, is exactly comfortable to sleep on. She can’t believe she’s thinking about this, but –

Flynn, still clearly ruing his lack of a firearm, makes another check around her apartment, then sits back down on the couch. It’s about half as long as he is, and his legs will clearly be dangling over the end. Lucy has no obligation of hospitality, and in fact is sorely wishing she left the library at her normal time of eleven o’clock PM. Then she wouldn’t have run into him (unless he let himself in to wait for her) and this would not be happening. It’s not that late, and ordinarily she might get into bed and watch something on her laptop, but her concentration is shot. She heads into her bedroom, shuts the door, and changes into her pajamas, then goes to the bathroom and washes her face several times, staring at herself in the mirror. She still appears to be real. Somehow, this is happening. Maybe it will stop doing that.

Lucy brushes her teeth and hair, and mulls a long bath, but it feels awkward with a NSA (she thinks he’s NSA, at any rate) agent sitting in her living room, even one ostensibly there to protect rather than spy on her. She goes out and climbs into bed, tugs the covers up, and lies there for a long time, staring at the ceiling. Every time a car pulls into the parking lot, she tenses. Keeps listening for footsteps on the stairs, a knock on the door, but nothing.

Lucy eventually drifts off, has scattered and turbulent dreams, and wakes with a start sometime past midnight. She gets up in search of a drink of water, and when she peers into the living room, sees that Flynn has dozed off on the couch, still dressed and sitting up. Something wrenches in her heart, she can’t even explain what, and she pads out. Taps on his shoulder, and he wakes instantly, snapping to awareness, in what must be a long-honed reflex. When he sees it’s her, he relaxes, if only slightly. “Is something wrong, Lucy?”

Her name sounds softer in his mouth than it did earlier. Less as if it’s coming from a stranger, and Lucy shakes her head. “No, it’s fine. It’s. . . you just didn’t look very comfortable.”

“I’m all right.” He grimaces, though he tries not to let her see. “It’s not the worst place I’ve slept.”

“Thank you,” Lucy says simply. “For staying.”

He starts to say something, then forgets or stops halfway through. Their eyes meet with a frisson that Lucy is fairly sure both of them feel. There is a touch of destiny about the idea that they’ve run into each other seven years apart almost to the day, that he saved her life the first time and is making sure he does again. Trying to be unobtrusive, she glances down at his left hand. He isn’t wearing a wedding band, but she doesn’t know if there’s someone else in his life anyway. Not that this is remotely her business. She’s not interested in dating him. For Pete’s sake.

(She isn’t altogether sure, however, that she isn’t interested in something else.)

She considers a moment longer. Then she decides that he can take it however he wants, and says, “Come on.”

Flynn looks almost comically startled as she beckons him to his feet. He hangs back, then follows her into the dark bedroom, her covers still tousled and warm with the imprint of her, her sheets glowing soft white in the murk. It’s clear he’s wondering if he’s supposed to climb in with her, and it is equally clear that he isn’t sure if he’ll refuse. “Lucy – ”

“Look, just. . .” This isn’t her style. Lucy Good Girl Preston. She has never had sex on a first date, this does not even qualify as a first date, and similarly, she likes nice men. Genuinely nice ones, that is, the smart and thoughtful ones with a grown-up job who she can talk to and feel supported. Whatever Flynn is, he is not nice. “It’s a queen bed. There’s room.”

Flynn continues to hesitate. Finally, he shucks his shoes, jacket, and belt, and gets on top of the covers next to her. The bedsprings creak under his weight, and even here, his feet extend a few inches past the end of the mattress. Lucy lies there with her eyes closed, well aware that she knew she wasn’t going to get back to sleep with this unfamiliar masculine presence on her bed, fighting herself back and forth. She thought he was here to possibly throw her into the trunk of a car or whatever else, it is – to say the least – concerning that she is now considering, well, the opposite. Her mouth is dry. It has been two years since Noah and as noted, she doesn’t do one-night stands. She doesn’t think Flynn is horrified or repelled by her. Oh God, this is stupid.

After fifteen minutes of increasingly excruciating feigned-sleep, Lucy gives up the ghost. Sits up fast enough to startle him, and she feels guilty, as if she’s somehow the one jerking him around by all this. They stare at each other, faces close in the dark. She can feel the whisper of his breath on her cheek. In this light, his eyes look almost hazel. His tongue darts out to touch his lips, almost unconsciously, and he shifts as if to ease the fit of his trousers. “Lucy – ”

Slowly, lightly, timidly, Lucy raises her hand and brushes her fingers across his chest, to the unbuttoned neck of his shirt. A shudder runs through him – well, no, he doesn’t look repulsed. It seems to take a great deal of self-control for him not to reach up and grab her hand, but not because he doesn’t want her to touch him. Just that this is a man used to controlling everything, to setting parameters, establishing boundaries. Sweeping for bugs. Making sure it’s clear. He takes the lead by temperament and occupation. That’s just who he is. And yet –

Lucy’s fingers settle in the hollow of his throat. She can feel his pulse bumping against them like a jackhammer, the way both of them have forgotten how to breathe, noses almost brushing. If she kissed him right now, if she actually did that – it would be one way to relieve her stress, an unhelpful little voice whispers in her brain. And then possibly cause any number of other things, but still. If he’s meant to be here somehow, if they’ve been led together again for some greater plan. . . Lucy isn’t religious, exactly, but she finds herself believing in some sort of unity, some kind of intention. Maybe it comes from being a historian. Looking at how everything has fitted together and interlocked, built upon each other like a flowering vine, gone forward and backward. The big picture. That’s how she always looks at it.

This feels like that, but different. Something like design, maybe. If she wants to call it that. But really, a whole lot more like desire.

Flynn doesn’t try to pull away from her, but Lucy can’t tell if that’s just because he’s stunned that she’s the one making a move on him, after the way the night started out. She shifts her weight, absurdly self-conscious, feeling like a nervous, bespectacled seventeen-year-old all over again. Lifts her hand and lays it alongside his face, strokes a thumb over the groove alongside his mouth. Then, when he still doesn’t stop her, she leans closer.

Flynn recovers from his paralysis just enough to lean in himself, and they knock noses painfully, forcing them away with muffled exclamations. It seems to jerk them back to their senses, both of them apologizing at the same moment. Lucy’s cheeks start to flame. “I – we should – shouldn’t.”

If Flynn was feeling as dickish as she gets the sense he might usually be, he could easily point out that she was the one who thought they should. He, however, doesn’t. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, even though they didn’t actually kiss. “I’ll go back out.”

Lucy supposes that, strictly speaking, is a good plan. She doesn’t need to keep making this mistake, having been saved from it the first time around. Her voice is breathy and choked. “Ok – okay.”

Flynn glances back at her, then shifts himself off the bed, standing up and collecting his jacket and shoes. It’s on the tip of her tongue to tell him not to go, but if he stays here on the bed, something else is going to happen, and on the most brutally practical level, Lucy doesn’t have any condoms. They’re not something you need when you’ve been single for two years because your current relationship is with Abraham Lincoln (and in a less weird-cat-lady-way than that sounds). She wishes for once that she wasn’t so confoundedly rational. But still.

Once the door shuts behind him, she falls back on her pillows, flushed and breathing much harder than she should. All that, and she didn’t even get actually kissed for it. This night has been a total bitch.

(Dissertation, she reminds herself. Tomorrow is Saturday, and she needs to go grocery shopping and clean the house, but she can still do a little work.)

(Dissertation.)

Flynn’s face floats in front of hers. She has a hard time thinking that she’ll forget it again.

Out in the living room, the couch creaks as Flynn must sit back down to resume his lonely vigil, and Lucy clenches her fists, reminding herself that she is absolutely under no circumstances going to go out there instead. She rolls over into a more comfortable position, reaches for her phone to check the time – it’s 3:32 AM – and closes her eyes determinedly. Maybe he will be gone when she wakes up, and she will successfully convince herself that it was all a dream.

Finally, slowly, badly, she sleeps.

Wrote this just over two years ago, while travelling back some 120 miles on public transport from a fantastic gig. 

It was one of those sticky nights, when the cool side of the pillow dissipates as soon as you turn it over. St Pancras station at 1 am on one of these Saturday nights is a strange place. Colourful drunks lounge haphazardly over seats as Carly Rae Jepsen's "Your Type" blares uncomfortably loudly from the jukebox in the food court; it's only occupants are a tramp and a pigeon wrestling for control of a half eaten burger.

Down on the subterranean platforms a smartly dressed man buzzes a razor over his stubble, smoothing his face. A jittery youth taps and mumbles along to the bass bleeding from his cheap headphones as he paces up and down the platform. Across the tracks, a middle aged couple bicker about their day, each blaming the other for some perceived slight against them that "ruined a lovely day until then". A man in a fashionably aged black t-shirt promoting a 1970s rock band sits down between me and Razor Reg, down one end of the platform. A few lone women loiter near the relative safety of the platform entrance, in easy reach of a staff member should their night get uncomfortable.

The youth in the headphones continues jitterbugging up and down our platform, the steady thud from his bass rising and falling as he passes and recedes. The smart man accidentally squeaks out a fart; he looks round hoping nobody heard over the sound of his razor, but Rocker Billy and I have already shared a quiet smile together. The train is ten minutes away, and I am still two hours from my bed and sleep.

The couple on the litter strewn northbound platform have resolved their differences and are demonstrating this with a sloppy snogging session. It's touch and go whether this is better than the argument or not. The downside of platforms buried under concrete, earth and fashionable boutiques is a complete lack of phone signal - not that my provider covered themselves in glory in medium sized Buckinghamshire towns on the previous journey, anyway - so no distractions with social media or music. The allure of a downloaded podcast tugs gently at me, but in my current state sleep would quickly follow and I'd wake up in a depot somewhere, or knowing my luck, somewhere even worse, like Swindon.

Mac and Megan Makeout have been joined on their side by Jitterbug. He stops his pacing and proclaims across the tracks to us, "they is coming, you know!" devoid of context. I ponder whether he's referring to the Spice Girls reunion, the advertised train services (still ten minutes away!) or something even more sinister. Briefly I consider sharing this with Rocker Billy but I decide against it - it could provoke further conversation and I just want the train to be here so I can put my headphones on and curl up with my book.

The chimes of an announcement interrupt our various thoughts, and as one we turn our faces to the ceiling, despite the loudspeakers being installed at waist height as part of a government scheme to aid accessibility (or funnel extra cash to suppliers to replace the inevitably vandalised one speaker in three, you decide). The monotonous drone of the voice is barely audible over the cracking from the speakers but it seems to imply my train will call additionally at somewhere in east Kent before a south London station. Bemused, I keep my eye on the screen for clarification, and the update on the display shows a much more geographically sensible additional stop.

The train is only ten minutes away. The display proclaims that it's between a station that never opened and one that sounds Swedish. I don't trust it. I check to see if Hårga station is actually served by trains, any trains, and isn't just an IKEA dinner set but my phone mockingly displays no signal. At least when it did this earlier I had cows to look at out the window! My smartwatch is two minutes faster than the time displayed on the train departure board above Razor Reg, but as my watch also thinks it's 1970 I'm not inclined to trust that either. Perhaps Rocker Billy's gravitational pull has affected it. I tut to myself the disappointment that he's not wearing a different band's shirt, with him affecting time like a black hole, and it technically being the Sabbath after all!

I compose a tweet musing on how it never really feels like tomorrow until you've slept, no matter what the clocks say, and delete it from my drafts. None of my followers that are awake at this time are going to find it funny - take away those under the influence of drink, drugs or music and my feed right now is probably just baseball updates and that weird group Tetris twitter. Perhaps I should institute a delay in tweeting more often. Like the delay to this train, an infinite ten minutes. Maybe I should follow Jitterbug in his pacing, stop my muscles atrophying. There are barely a dozen of us down here. Is civilisation still there above? Are we all that's left of the human race? Mac and Meg seem to be well on their way to repopulating the earth by themselves, judging by their frenzied roaming all over each other while each attempts to devour the other. Suddenly the repeated automated announcements about CCTV coverage of the station make sense, they're not usually played on a perpetual loop and I suspect they’ve been manually prompted to try and stop the couple progressing further.

Jitterbug has sped up his pacing, almost sprinting up and down the other platform. I don't blame you mate, I wouldn't want to hang around those two either, they might try and drag you in! He's moving fast enough that his pupils seem to make up the whole of his eyes... That, or whatever has made him so jittery. A crystal clear tannoy announcement interrupts the CCTV one to let us know that our train is now only ten minutes away. It's only after it fades away and the CCTV announcements return, at the behest of someone in a control room somewhere being put off their mid shift meal by arcane meeting rituals on platform B, that it occurs to me how odd the tannoy was. There's a fair few international passengers at this station so announcing it in French first must be something new being introduced, but they don't tend to address me by name.

Reg moves his razor up and over the thinning grey of his temples. Billy taps out a drum rhythm almost, but not entirely unlike a Rolling Stones song. I wonder if I really need to save my two remaining cans of Danish lager from the cheap off licence round the corner for the train, or if I should open one now. The train is only ten minutes away though, I can wait. My watch is now an hour fast, if it hasn't fixed itself when I get mobile signal I'll reset it at home tomorrow. Today. After sleep, at any rate.

A trio of women squeezed into too tight clothes tottering on high heels have joined us on our platform. One says something that sounds hilarious to all three; the acoustics of the concrete box make the laughs sound like cackles. I realise that buried beneath the earth, surrounded by concrete, we're effectively sharing a Mausoleum. A pigeon breaks that thought by fluttering in from the outside, through the same tunnel my train will arrive in ten minutes. It turns to head back out, revealing a burnt featherless side to its head. Suddenly I regret my fried chicken for dinner earlier. The trio find this, or something unrelated, even more hilarious, their cackles booming around the station box.

Mac whispers something to Meg, which makes them both chuckle. Jitterbug grins at their mirth, which they find funnier, a feedback loop of laughs on the other platform. Reg nicks himself with his razor. As the blood trickles down his neck he brushes a hand over it, and finds the smear on his fingers funny. He shows Billy, who shares in the joke, the pair howling with laughter, tears falling from their eyes. The three on the other platform all have their arms around each other, heads thrown back, laughing uproariously. The lone women have departed, if they ever really were there to begin with. Laughs of various pitches and volume echo around the tomb of a station, drowning out announcements which now appear to be in Old English.

My train is only ten minutes away.

our weird and incompetent temp keeps getting rehired

A reader writes:

I changed jobs about a year ago to escape a toxic workplace. While I feel valued at my new job by my coworkers and manager, I still have that “I’m new, I don’t want to make waves” mentality. A few weeks after I started here, they hired a temp to catch up on the workload, since my post had been vacant for almost a year.

The temp is WEIRD and incompetent (incompotemp?). And yet, they keep re-hiring her for chunks of 2-3 months at a time.

Here are a few examples of the weird things she does:

• Says the government creates natural disasters to “cull the herd.” • Talks about sexual things during group lunches, such as the consistency of, uh, male fluids pre-and-post vasectomy. • Claims she was an army spy in an era when she would have been a toddler.

And examples of what I perceive as incompetence:

• Is extremely slow. For example, dossiers that take pros about 30 minutes and newbies about 60 minutes will take her an entire day, despite all the practice. • Claims to be a “details girl,” misses a LOT of details. For example, the table of contents on multiple projects she’s worked on doesn’t work because she never bothered checking the links. • Writes very strangely and not concisely. This example is made up, but I swear, I’m in NO WAY exaggerating: “Secondly, I identified a discrepancy in how the spelling of AnimalCrackers was written in the bottom-right corner of the footer of the Animal Crackers page, whereby the ‘c’ in crackers is lowercase whereas it should be modified to reflect an uppercase ‘C’.” Instead of just saying, “In the footer of page (link) Animalcrackers should be AnimalCrackers.” • Sends long emails correcting others on inconsequential stuff, cc’s everyone. For example, lists all the typos in an internal process document sent to us by IT (in the same way as detailed above), cc’ing the team, the IT guy, our manager, the IT manager. • Asks questions and will go to someone else if you don’t hand-hold her. For example she couldn’t see the lion crackers folder. I explained it was a permissions problem and she had to open a ticket with IT because they have a dedicated team that works on the animal crackers folders. I sent her the link. She said okay. Minutes later, I heard her asking another temp about it. When he couldn’t help, I heard her pulling her friend from IT to her desk and asking him to fix it. He explained the same thing (about having to open a ticket & the dedicated animal crackers team separate from them). SHE ASKED HIM WHERE TO FIND THE IT TICKETING SYSTEM. You know, the link I sent her. • Constantly calls me over to help her with things she should know how to fix. It’s not that I mind helping, but it’s always dumb stuff like “The animal crackers statistics aren’t working!” I pull up a chair and see she forgot to plug in the animal tail sizes. Over. And over. And over again.

I’m not in a position where I’m her supervisor, although I often QA her work, and in the absence of the team lead, I’m in charge. I don’t know if it’s my place to say something. What do you think?

Also: she applied for a year-long assignment that might become a permanent position, and boy howdy I’m not sure I can handle her as a permanent fixture on the team. What do I do?

I get so many questions that are a variation of “should I tell my boss about serious problems with a coworker’s work?” (but yours is by far the most interesting and entertaining, so thank you for that) and the answer is nearly always:

You absolutely, 100% can give your boss a discreet heads-up about serious problems that you are noticing in a coworker’s work.

I know that the conventional wisdom is “if it doesn’t affect you or your work, stay out of it” … but that’s really about things like “Jane is five minutes late every day” or “Bob has a nest of old soda cans under his desk” or “Cecil has a different style with clients than I do.”

When someone has serious performance issues, that’s something your manager would want to know about. Not in a “Jane sucks!” kind of way, but a professionally delivered, discreet, one-time heads-up about something that appears serious to you and that she might not have noticed. (And yes, it’s odd that your manager hasn’t picked up on this yet, but maybe she has much less contact with the temp than you do … or figures being weird is no crime and doesn’t realize there are actual performance issues too.)

Here’s how I’d say it: “I’m not sure if this is something I should mention to you or not, but I think it’s having enough work impact that I should. I’ve noticed some concerning things about Jane’s work — dossiers that would normally take 30-60 minutes are taking all day, and she’s regularly missing details like X and Y. I’ve noticed something that makes me think she’s not retaining pretty fundamental information — she’s asked me to help her fix the same problem over and over. I know she was brought on as a temp to help catch up on the workload after my position had been open for so long, and I’m not sure what the plan is for whether we’ll continue to renew that contract, but these seem like serious enough concerns that I wanted to bring them to your attention.”

(In fact, you have extra standing to bring this up because she was brought on to help catch up on your workload. I assume that means you have particular insight into how helpful she is or isn’t being.)

By the way, note that I’m leaving out the interpersonal weirdness. That doesn’t rise to the level of a manager needing to know the way the rest does. (Although if she’s talking about semen at lunch, you have every right to tell her to stop and to escalate it if she continues to talk sex at work.)

Now, from there, it’s up to your manager what to do. If she’s a weak manager, she may not address it, and there’s not much else you can do at that point. It’s reasonable and appropriate to raise it once, but it’s not something you should harp on after that. (The exception to that is if you manager seems very concerned and says she’ll address it and you don’t see any changes. Sometimes a manager thinks she’s addressed something, doesn’t realize the problem is continuing, and appreciates a heads-on that it’s still ongoing. This can be tricky though; you have to be able to tell the difference between “truly wanted to address it, thinks she did, and would very much want to know what’s happening now” and “did the minimum and doesn’t want to deal with it again.”)

You may also like:

I can’t go on vacation because no temp can meet my boss’s demanding expectations

I think an employee is sending nude Snapchats to his coworkers … with animal filters

updates: the Christmas lunch, the fired boss, and more

our weird and incompetent temp keeps getting rehired was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

from Ask a Manager http://bit.ly/2BjmCVz

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The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include a GDC talk on 'the aesthetics of cute', the hidden story of TOSE, & the return to car wrecking of key Burnout developers.

Another interesting week of longer-form 'things', and I've been ruminating a bit on how these videos and articles intersect in weird but neat ways with 'breaking news' or 'hottest games'. Seems like you'll get at least _some_ bleed-through - for example, this week we have Battlegrounds, Signal From Tolva & Night In The Woods again, all of which are newish or interesting releases.

But many of these pieces are evergreen & exist separately of the 'hot reactions' grind. Which is good. Exist too close to the 24-hour hype cycle, and you'll miss trends and more thoughtful takes like some of these good folks. VGDC aims to reverse that. We hope you think we do a good job.

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

Guild Wars 2’s art style passes from father to son (Philippa Warr / RockPaperShotgun) "Recently I had the chance to talk to ArenaNet (and thus Guild Wars 2) art director Horia Dociu about his work at the studio. One of the interesting things about his promotion to the role is that he succeeds his father, Daniel."

We’ve been missing a big part of game industry’s digital revolution (Kyle Orland / Ars Technica) "Last year, the Entertainment Software Association's annual "Essential Facts" report suggested that the US game industry generated $16.5 billion in "content" sales annually (excluding hardware and accessories). In this year's report, that number had grown to a whopping $24.5 billion, a nearly 50-percent increase in a span of 12 months. No, video games didn't actually become half again as popular with Americans over the course of 2016. Instead, tracking firm NPD simply updated the way it counts the still-shadowy world of digital game sales."

Warren Spector believes games 'need to be asking bigger questions' (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "Gamasutra sat down with Spector at GDC last month to catch up on how the process is going, roughly a year into his full-time gig at OtherSide. It was an interesting conversation, especially if you're at all interested in where games are at these days, where they came from, and what sorts of stories they're best at telling."

A Rare Look Inside Nintendo (Otaku / Game Escape / YouTube) "This clip is an excerpt from the French documentary film "Otaku" by director Jean-Jacques Beineix from 1994. It appeared dubbed on German TV some time later, which is the version you are seeing here. It has, to my knowledge, never been released in English. The subtitles are my own. Content is the intellectual property of the original rights holders."

An Interview With One of Those Hackers Screwing With Your 'Black Ops 2' Games(Patrick Klepek / Waypoint) "He's not there to ruin your stats. He's there to sell you software that'll let you launch a DDOS attack from your Xbox 360. [SIMON'S NOTE: this is crazy - modded Xbox 360s that find other player's IP addresses and can DDOS them?! I had no idea.]"

Put a Face on It: The Aesthetics of Cute (Jenny Jiao Hsia / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, Hexecutable's Jenny Jiao Hsia explains why cuteness as an aesthetic may be worth exploring for developers who want to push against current trends in game design."

Proc. Gen. and Pleasant Land | Sir You Are Being Hunted (Robert Seddon / Heterotopias) "It was a perfect rustic idyll, in its way. Perfectly lovely, nestled between the grassy fields. Perfectly quiet, as only dead places can be. Perfectly still, because a player careless enough to create a disturbance might attract the robotic hunters. Big Robot’s Sir You Are Being Hunted had, through the digital governance of its landscape generation algorithms, somehow perfected the British countryside."

How video games were made - part 3: Marketing and Business (Strafefox / YouTube) "In this final chapter we cover the business side and marketing of 8 and 16 bit games. [SIMON'S NOTE: Lots of archival footage in here & SO much work cutting it all together - and the other entries in the 'how video games were made' series look pretty good too!]"

Video Games Are Better Without Stories (Ian Bogost / The Atlantic) "A longstanding dream: Video games will evolve into interactive stories, like the ones that play out fictionally on the Star Trek Holodeck. In this hypothetical future, players could interact with computerized characters as round as those in novels or films, making choices that would influence an ever-evolving plot. [SIMON'S NOTE: lots of responses to this all over the Internet - here's a couple of good ones from the Waypoint folks.]"

'Burnout' Series Creator Talks Remaking Crash Mode for 'Danger Zone' (John Davison / Glixel) "Spend longer than a few minutes talking with fans of driving games about which series they'd love to see revived, and invariably someone will bring up Criterion's Burnout. Unlike contemporaries that were leaning harder into realism and officially-licensed cars as a response to games like Gran Turismo, the first Burnout – released by Acclaim for PlayStation 2 in 2001 – was unapologetically action-focused."

Famitsu Special Report – The Mystery of TOSE (Famitsu / One Million Power) "This is the real story behind TOSE: The game development company that’s been making games for nearly 38 years (since 1979), but hardly any gamers know. [SIMON'S NOTE: Brandon Sheffield covered TOSE for Gamasutra back in 2006, but by and large, they've been PRETTY vague about what they work on - which is fascinating.]"

How Three Kids With No Experience Beat Square And Translated Final Fantasy V Into English (Jason Schreier / Kotaku) "One day in the late 1990s, Myria walked into the Irvine High School computer room and spotted a boy playing Final Fantasy V. There were two unusual things about this. The first was that Final Fantasy V had not actually come out in the United States."

Night in the Woods is Important (HeavyEyed / YouTube) "An analysis of the recently released game - this video contains very minimal spoilers but watch at your own discretion.."

Designing the giant battle royale maps of Playerunknown's Battlegrounds (Alan Bradley / Gamasutra) "For Brendan "Playerunknown" Greene, the creator of Battlegrounds, the vision for his game world was born from extensive experience creating and manipulating environments that direct players to play his games the way he intends them to be played."

All We Have Is Words (Matthew Burns / Magical Wasteland) "Sometimes I give the impression of knowing Japanese, but I really don’t. I have no claim to it. I never made a real study of the language, I don’t know kanji and thus can’t read at all, and even in speech I can’t exchange more than pleasantries or the most rudimentary logistical information. [SIMON'S NOTE: I believe this is a subtle 'subtweet'-style article response to the recent Persona 5 translation furore? Maybe?]"

Changing the Game: What's Next for Anita Sarkeesian (Laura A. Parker / Glixel) "Anita Sarkeesian’s talk at this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco falls at an unfortunate time: 10am on the last day of the conference – a Friday. Most attendees – a mix of indie programmers, mainstream publishing teams and media – are still bleary eyed from the night before. And yet, at five-to-ten, the small room on the third floor of the Moscone Convention Center is standing-room only."

The quest to crack and preserve vintage Apple II software (Leigh Alexander and Iain Chambers / The Guardian Podcast) "Why has the quest to hack old Apple II software become the best hope we have of preserving a part of our cultural history? How do these floppy discs – still turning up in their box-loads – shine a light on the educational philosophies of the 80s? And do a new generation of gamers risk losing whole days of their lives by playing these compelling retro games in their browsers?"

Video Games Help Model Brain’s Neurons (Nick Wingfield / New York Times) "Since November, thousands of people have played the game, “Mozak,” which uses common tricks of the medium — points, leveling up and leader boards that publicly rank the performance of players — to crowdsource the creation of three-dimensional models of neurons."

Longtime 'Star Citizen' Backers Want Its New Referral Contest to Die in a Black Hole (Leif Johnson / Motherboard) "Developers of multiplayer video games often host referral programs encouraging existing players to recruit their friends for a boost in cash flow, and in that regard, the new referral contest from Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium Games isn't much out of the ordinary. The same can't be said of the reactions from the players themselves."

Localization Shenanigans in the Chinese Speaking World (Jung-Sheng Lin / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, IGDShare's Jung-Sheng Lin discusses a wide variety of possible issues that can arise when undertaking Chinese localization for your game. These problems include grappling simplified vs. traditional Chinese, naming problems, UI & fonts, and China-specific policies that may relate to localization, political implications, and more."

Good Game/Tech/History Youtubers (Phoe / Medium) "[SIMON'S NOTE: this got birthed after a conversation I had with Phoe in the Video Game History Foundation Discord chat - he watches a lot of good retro/interesting YouTube, and there's a number of recommendations in here I was unaware of!]

Red Bull TV - Screenland (Red Bull TV) "Plug into the fresh stories within the world of video games and game design. The personal tales, wild new developments, and unexpected genres shed new light on what gaming means in the world now and what it could mean in the future. [SIMON'S NOTE: this is an entire _season_ of gaming documentaries, including with Frank Cifaldi (Video Game History Foundation), UK cult classic Knightmare, and lots more.]"

Tim Schafer tells the story of Amnesia Fortnight (Philippa Warr / RockPaperShotgun) "“I started feeling a little bogged down by the scope of [Brutal Legend],” says Tim Schafer, founder of Double Fine. “It was really huge and I felt like the team had been doing it for a long time and had a long way to go yet. I felt like they needed a break.” That break was Amnesia Fortnight, a two week game jam during which anyone at the developer can pitch an idea and, if it’s selected, lead a team to turn it from concept to working prototype."

The Signal From Tolva: The Best Game Ever (Matt Lees / Cool Ghosts / YouTube) "New video! Matt dives into a spooky robot world, to talk about some of the cool design aspects of The Signal From Tölva. [SIMON'S NOTE: Can't emphasize enough that Cool Ghosts has some of the best game criticism on YouTube. Please patronize them! (On Patreon, not by talking down to them.)"

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to [email protected]. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include a GDC talk on 'the aesthetics of cute', the hidden story of TOSE, & the return to car wrecking of key Burnout developers.

Another interesting week of longer-form 'things', and I've been ruminating a bit on how these videos and articles intersect in weird but neat ways with 'breaking news' or 'hottest games'. Seems like you'll get at least _some_ bleed-through - for example, this week we have Battlegrounds, Signal From Tolva & Night In The Woods again, all of which are newish or interesting releases.

But many of these pieces are evergreen & exist separately of the 'hot reactions' grind. Which is good. Exist too close to the 24-hour hype cycle, and you'll miss trends and more thoughtful takes like some of these good folks. VGDC aims to reverse that. We hope you think we do a good job.

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

Guild Wars 2’s art style passes from father to son (Philippa Warr / RockPaperShotgun) "Recently I had the chance to talk to ArenaNet (and thus Guild Wars 2) art director Horia Dociu about his work at the studio. One of the interesting things about his promotion to the role is that he succeeds his father, Daniel."

We’ve been missing a big part of game industry’s digital revolution (Kyle Orland / Ars Technica) "Last year, the Entertainment Software Association's annual "Essential Facts" report suggested that the US game industry generated $16.5 billion in "content" sales annually (excluding hardware and accessories). In this year's report, that number had grown to a whopping $24.5 billion, a nearly 50-percent increase in a span of 12 months. No, video games didn't actually become half again as popular with Americans over the course of 2016. Instead, tracking firm NPD simply updated the way it counts the still-shadowy world of digital game sales."

Warren Spector believes games 'need to be asking bigger questions' (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "Gamasutra sat down with Spector at GDC last month to catch up on how the process is going, roughly a year into his full-time gig at OtherSide. It was an interesting conversation, especially if you're at all interested in where games are at these days, where they came from, and what sorts of stories they're best at telling."

A Rare Look Inside Nintendo (Otaku / Game Escape / YouTube) "This clip is an excerpt from the French documentary film "Otaku" by director Jean-Jacques Beineix from 1994. It appeared dubbed on German TV some time later, which is the version you are seeing here. It has, to my knowledge, never been released in English. The subtitles are my own. Content is the intellectual property of the original rights holders."

An Interview With One of Those Hackers Screwing With Your 'Black Ops 2' Games(Patrick Klepek / Waypoint) "He's not there to ruin your stats. He's there to sell you software that'll let you launch a DDOS attack from your Xbox 360. [SIMON'S NOTE: this is crazy - modded Xbox 360s that find other player's IP addresses and can DDOS them?! I had no idea.]"

Put a Face on It: The Aesthetics of Cute (Jenny Jiao Hsia / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, Hexecutable's Jenny Jiao Hsia explains why cuteness as an aesthetic may be worth exploring for developers who want to push against current trends in game design."

Proc. Gen. and Pleasant Land | Sir You Are Being Hunted (Robert Seddon / Heterotopias) "It was a perfect rustic idyll, in its way. Perfectly lovely, nestled between the grassy fields. Perfectly quiet, as only dead places can be. Perfectly still, because a player careless enough to create a disturbance might attract the robotic hunters. Big Robot’s Sir You Are Being Hunted had, through the digital governance of its landscape generation algorithms, somehow perfected the British countryside."

How video games were made - part 3: Marketing and Business (Strafefox / YouTube) "In this final chapter we cover the business side and marketing of 8 and 16 bit games. [SIMON'S NOTE: Lots of archival footage in here & SO much work cutting it all together - and the other entries in the 'how video games were made' series look pretty good too!]"

Video Games Are Better Without Stories (Ian Bogost / The Atlantic) "A longstanding dream: Video games will evolve into interactive stories, like the ones that play out fictionally on the Star Trek Holodeck. In this hypothetical future, players could interact with computerized characters as round as those in novels or films, making choices that would influence an ever-evolving plot. [SIMON'S NOTE: lots of responses to this all over the Internet - here's a couple of good ones from the Waypoint folks.]"

'Burnout' Series Creator Talks Remaking Crash Mode for 'Danger Zone' (John Davison / Glixel) "Spend longer than a few minutes talking with fans of driving games about which series they'd love to see revived, and invariably someone will bring up Criterion's Burnout. Unlike contemporaries that were leaning harder into realism and officially-licensed cars as a response to games like Gran Turismo, the first Burnout – released by Acclaim for PlayStation 2 in 2001 – was unapologetically action-focused."

Famitsu Special Report – The Mystery of TOSE (Famitsu / One Million Power) "This is the real story behind TOSE: The game development company that’s been making games for nearly 38 years (since 1979), but hardly any gamers know. [SIMON'S NOTE: Brandon Sheffield covered TOSE for Gamasutra back in 2006, but by and large, they've been PRETTY vague about what they work on - which is fascinating.]"

How Three Kids With No Experience Beat Square And Translated Final Fantasy V Into English (Jason Schreier / Kotaku) "One day in the late 1990s, Myria walked into the Irvine High School computer room and spotted a boy playing Final Fantasy V. There were two unusual things about this. The first was that Final Fantasy V had not actually come out in the United States."

Night in the Woods is Important (HeavyEyed / YouTube) "An analysis of the recently released game - this video contains very minimal spoilers but watch at your own discretion.."

Designing the giant battle royale maps of Playerunknown's Battlegrounds (Alan Bradley / Gamasutra) "For Brendan "Playerunknown" Greene, the creator of Battlegrounds, the vision for his game world was born from extensive experience creating and manipulating environments that direct players to play his games the way he intends them to be played."

All We Have Is Words (Matthew Burns / Magical Wasteland) "Sometimes I give the impression of knowing Japanese, but I really don’t. I have no claim to it. I never made a real study of the language, I don’t know kanji and thus can’t read at all, and even in speech I can’t exchange more than pleasantries or the most rudimentary logistical information. [SIMON'S NOTE: I believe this is a subtle 'subtweet'-style article response to the recent Persona 5 translation furore? Maybe?]"

Changing the Game: What's Next for Anita Sarkeesian (Laura A. Parker / Glixel) "Anita Sarkeesian’s talk at this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco falls at an unfortunate time: 10am on the last day of the conference – a Friday. Most attendees – a mix of indie programmers, mainstream publishing teams and media – are still bleary eyed from the night before. And yet, at five-to-ten, the small room on the third floor of the Moscone Convention Center is standing-room only."

The quest to crack and preserve vintage Apple II software (Leigh Alexander and Iain Chambers / The Guardian Podcast) "Why has the quest to hack old Apple II software become the best hope we have of preserving a part of our cultural history? How do these floppy discs – still turning up in their box-loads – shine a light on the educational philosophies of the 80s? And do a new generation of gamers risk losing whole days of their lives by playing these compelling retro games in their browsers?"

Video Games Help Model Brain’s Neurons (Nick Wingfield / New York Times) "Since November, thousands of people have played the game, “Mozak,” which uses common tricks of the medium — points, leveling up and leader boards that publicly rank the performance of players — to crowdsource the creation of three-dimensional models of neurons."

Longtime 'Star Citizen' Backers Want Its New Referral Contest to Die in a Black Hole (Leif Johnson / Motherboard) "Developers of multiplayer video games often host referral programs encouraging existing players to recruit their friends for a boost in cash flow, and in that regard, the new referral contest from Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium Games isn't much out of the ordinary. The same can't be said of the reactions from the players themselves."

Localization Shenanigans in the Chinese Speaking World (Jung-Sheng Lin / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, IGDShare's Jung-Sheng Lin discusses a wide variety of possible issues that can arise when undertaking Chinese localization for your game. These problems include grappling simplified vs. traditional Chinese, naming problems, UI & fonts, and China-specific policies that may relate to localization, political implications, and more."

Good Game/Tech/History Youtubers (Phoe / Medium) "[SIMON'S NOTE: this got birthed after a conversation I had with Phoe in the Video Game History Foundation Discord chat - he watches a lot of good retro/interesting YouTube, and there's a number of recommendations in here I was unaware of!]

Red Bull TV - Screenland (Red Bull TV) "Plug into the fresh stories within the world of video games and game design. The personal tales, wild new developments, and unexpected genres shed new light on what gaming means in the world now and what it could mean in the future. [SIMON'S NOTE: this is an entire _season_ of gaming documentaries, including with Frank Cifaldi (Video Game History Foundation), UK cult classic Knightmare, and lots more.]"

Tim Schafer tells the story of Amnesia Fortnight (Philippa Warr / RockPaperShotgun) "“I started feeling a little bogged down by the scope of [Brutal Legend],” says Tim Schafer, founder of Double Fine. “It was really huge and I felt like the team had been doing it for a long time and had a long way to go yet. I felt like they needed a break.” That break was Amnesia Fortnight, a two week game jam during which anyone at the developer can pitch an idea and, if it’s selected, lead a team to turn it from concept to working prototype."

The Signal From Tolva: The Best Game Ever (Matt Lees / Cool Ghosts / YouTube) "New video! Matt dives into a spooky robot world, to talk about some of the cool design aspects of The Signal From Tölva. [SIMON'S NOTE: Can't emphasize enough that Cool Ghosts has some of the best game criticism on YouTube. Please patronize them! (On Patreon, not by talking down to them.)"

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to [email protected]. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include a GDC talk on 'the aesthetics of cute', the hidden story of TOSE, & the return to car wrecking of key Burnout developers.

Another interesting week of longer-form 'things', and I've been ruminating a bit on how these videos and articles intersect in weird but neat ways with 'breaking news' or 'hottest games'. Seems like you'll get at least _some_ bleed-through - for example, this week we have Battlegrounds, Signal From Tolva & Night In The Woods again, all of which are newish or interesting releases.

But many of these pieces are evergreen & exist separately of the 'hot reactions' grind. Which is good. Exist too close to the 24-hour hype cycle, and you'll miss trends and more thoughtful takes like some of these good folks. VGDC aims to reverse that. We hope you think we do a good job.

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

Guild Wars 2’s art style passes from father to son (Philippa Warr / RockPaperShotgun) "Recently I had the chance to talk to ArenaNet (and thus Guild Wars 2) art director Horia Dociu about his work at the studio. One of the interesting things about his promotion to the role is that he succeeds his father, Daniel."

We’ve been missing a big part of game industry’s digital revolution (Kyle Orland / Ars Technica) "Last year, the Entertainment Software Association's annual "Essential Facts" report suggested that the US game industry generated $16.5 billion in "content" sales annually (excluding hardware and accessories). In this year's report, that number had grown to a whopping $24.5 billion, a nearly 50-percent increase in a span of 12 months. No, video games didn't actually become half again as popular with Americans over the course of 2016. Instead, tracking firm NPD simply updated the way it counts the still-shadowy world of digital game sales."

Warren Spector believes games 'need to be asking bigger questions' (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "Gamasutra sat down with Spector at GDC last month to catch up on how the process is going, roughly a year into his full-time gig at OtherSide. It was an interesting conversation, especially if you're at all interested in where games are at these days, where they came from, and what sorts of stories they're best at telling."

A Rare Look Inside Nintendo (Otaku / Game Escape / YouTube) "This clip is an excerpt from the French documentary film "Otaku" by director Jean-Jacques Beineix from 1994. It appeared dubbed on German TV some time later, which is the version you are seeing here. It has, to my knowledge, never been released in English. The subtitles are my own. Content is the intellectual property of the original rights holders."

An Interview With One of Those Hackers Screwing With Your 'Black Ops 2' Games(Patrick Klepek / Waypoint) "He's not there to ruin your stats. He's there to sell you software that'll let you launch a DDOS attack from your Xbox 360. [SIMON'S NOTE: this is crazy - modded Xbox 360s that find other player's IP addresses and can DDOS them?! I had no idea.]"

Put a Face on It: The Aesthetics of Cute (Jenny Jiao Hsia / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, Hexecutable's Jenny Jiao Hsia explains why cuteness as an aesthetic may be worth exploring for developers who want to push against current trends in game design."

Proc. Gen. and Pleasant Land | Sir You Are Being Hunted (Robert Seddon / Heterotopias) "It was a perfect rustic idyll, in its way. Perfectly lovely, nestled between the grassy fields. Perfectly quiet, as only dead places can be. Perfectly still, because a player careless enough to create a disturbance might attract the robotic hunters. Big Robot’s Sir You Are Being Hunted had, through the digital governance of its landscape generation algorithms, somehow perfected the British countryside."

How video games were made - part 3: Marketing and Business (Strafefox / YouTube) "In this final chapter we cover the business side and marketing of 8 and 16 bit games. [SIMON'S NOTE: Lots of archival footage in here & SO much work cutting it all together - and the other entries in the 'how video games were made' series look pretty good too!]"

Video Games Are Better Without Stories (Ian Bogost / The Atlantic) "A longstanding dream: Video games will evolve into interactive stories, like the ones that play out fictionally on the Star Trek Holodeck. In this hypothetical future, players could interact with computerized characters as round as those in novels or films, making choices that would influence an ever-evolving plot. [SIMON'S NOTE: lots of responses to this all over the Internet - here's a couple of good ones from the Waypoint folks.]"

'Burnout' Series Creator Talks Remaking Crash Mode for 'Danger Zone' (John Davison / Glixel) "Spend longer than a few minutes talking with fans of driving games about which series they'd love to see revived, and invariably someone will bring up Criterion's Burnout. Unlike contemporaries that were leaning harder into realism and officially-licensed cars as a response to games like Gran Turismo, the first Burnout – released by Acclaim for PlayStation 2 in 2001 – was unapologetically action-focused."

Famitsu Special Report – The Mystery of TOSE (Famitsu / One Million Power) "This is the real story behind TOSE: The game development company that’s been making games for nearly 38 years (since 1979), but hardly any gamers know. [SIMON'S NOTE: Brandon Sheffield covered TOSE for Gamasutra back in 2006, but by and large, they've been PRETTY vague about what they work on - which is fascinating.]"

How Three Kids With No Experience Beat Square And Translated Final Fantasy V Into English (Jason Schreier / Kotaku) "One day in the late 1990s, Myria walked into the Irvine High School computer room and spotted a boy playing Final Fantasy V. There were two unusual things about this. The first was that Final Fantasy V had not actually come out in the United States."

Night in the Woods is Important (HeavyEyed / YouTube) "An analysis of the recently released game - this video contains very minimal spoilers but watch at your own discretion.."

Designing the giant battle royale maps of Playerunknown's Battlegrounds (Alan Bradley / Gamasutra) "For Brendan "Playerunknown" Greene, the creator of Battlegrounds, the vision for his game world was born from extensive experience creating and manipulating environments that direct players to play his games the way he intends them to be played."

All We Have Is Words (Matthew Burns / Magical Wasteland) "Sometimes I give the impression of knowing Japanese, but I really don’t. I have no claim to it. I never made a real study of the language, I don’t know kanji and thus can’t read at all, and even in speech I can’t exchange more than pleasantries or the most rudimentary logistical information. [SIMON'S NOTE: I believe this is a subtle 'subtweet'-style article response to the recent Persona 5 translation furore? Maybe?]"

Changing the Game: What's Next for Anita Sarkeesian (Laura A. Parker / Glixel) "Anita Sarkeesian’s talk at this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco falls at an unfortunate time: 10am on the last day of the conference – a Friday. Most attendees – a mix of indie programmers, mainstream publishing teams and media – are still bleary eyed from the night before. And yet, at five-to-ten, the small room on the third floor of the Moscone Convention Center is standing-room only."

The quest to crack and preserve vintage Apple II software (Leigh Alexander and Iain Chambers / The Guardian Podcast) "Why has the quest to hack old Apple II software become the best hope we have of preserving a part of our cultural history? How do these floppy discs – still turning up in their box-loads – shine a light on the educational philosophies of the 80s? And do a new generation of gamers risk losing whole days of their lives by playing these compelling retro games in their browsers?"

Video Games Help Model Brain’s Neurons (Nick Wingfield / New York Times) "Since November, thousands of people have played the game, “Mozak,” which uses common tricks of the medium — points, leveling up and leader boards that publicly rank the performance of players — to crowdsource the creation of three-dimensional models of neurons."

Longtime 'Star Citizen' Backers Want Its New Referral Contest to Die in a Black Hole (Leif Johnson / Motherboard) "Developers of multiplayer video games often host referral programs encouraging existing players to recruit their friends for a boost in cash flow, and in that regard, the new referral contest from Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium Games isn't much out of the ordinary. The same can't be said of the reactions from the players themselves."

Localization Shenanigans in the Chinese Speaking World (Jung-Sheng Lin / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, IGDShare's Jung-Sheng Lin discusses a wide variety of possible issues that can arise when undertaking Chinese localization for your game. These problems include grappling simplified vs. traditional Chinese, naming problems, UI & fonts, and China-specific policies that may relate to localization, political implications, and more."

Good Game/Tech/History Youtubers (Phoe / Medium) "[SIMON'S NOTE: this got birthed after a conversation I had with Phoe in the Video Game History Foundation Discord chat - he watches a lot of good retro/interesting YouTube, and there's a number of recommendations in here I was unaware of!]

Red Bull TV - Screenland (Red Bull TV) "Plug into the fresh stories within the world of video games and game design. The personal tales, wild new developments, and unexpected genres shed new light on what gaming means in the world now and what it could mean in the future. [SIMON'S NOTE: this is an entire _season_ of gaming documentaries, including with Frank Cifaldi (Video Game History Foundation), UK cult classic Knightmare, and lots more.]"

Tim Schafer tells the story of Amnesia Fortnight (Philippa Warr / RockPaperShotgun) "“I started feeling a little bogged down by the scope of [Brutal Legend],” says Tim Schafer, founder of Double Fine. “It was really huge and I felt like the team had been doing it for a long time and had a long way to go yet. I felt like they needed a break.” That break was Amnesia Fortnight, a two week game jam during which anyone at the developer can pitch an idea and, if it’s selected, lead a team to turn it from concept to working prototype."

The Signal From Tolva: The Best Game Ever (Matt Lees / Cool Ghosts / YouTube) "New video! Matt dives into a spooky robot world, to talk about some of the cool design aspects of The Signal From Tölva. [SIMON'S NOTE: Can't emphasize enough that Cool Ghosts has some of the best game criticism on YouTube. Please patronize them! (On Patreon, not by talking down to them.)"

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to [email protected]. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include a GDC talk on 'the aesthetics of cute', the hidden story of TOSE, & the return to car wrecking of key Burnout developers.

Another interesting week of longer-form 'things', and I've been ruminating a bit on how these videos and articles intersect in weird but neat ways with 'breaking news' or 'hottest games'. Seems like you'll get at least _some_ bleed-through - for example, this week we have Battlegrounds, Signal From Tolva & Night In The Woods again, all of which are newish or interesting releases.

But many of these pieces are evergreen & exist separately of the 'hot reactions' grind. Which is good. Exist too close to the 24-hour hype cycle, and you'll miss trends and more thoughtful takes like some of these good folks. VGDC aims to reverse that. We hope you think we do a good job.

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

Guild Wars 2’s art style passes from father to son (Philippa Warr / RockPaperShotgun) "Recently I had the chance to talk to ArenaNet (and thus Guild Wars 2) art director Horia Dociu about his work at the studio. One of the interesting things about his promotion to the role is that he succeeds his father, Daniel."

We’ve been missing a big part of game industry’s digital revolution (Kyle Orland / Ars Technica) "Last year, the Entertainment Software Association's annual "Essential Facts" report suggested that the US game industry generated $16.5 billion in "content" sales annually (excluding hardware and accessories). In this year's report, that number had grown to a whopping $24.5 billion, a nearly 50-percent increase in a span of 12 months. No, video games didn't actually become half again as popular with Americans over the course of 2016. Instead, tracking firm NPD simply updated the way it counts the still-shadowy world of digital game sales."

Warren Spector believes games 'need to be asking bigger questions' (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "Gamasutra sat down with Spector at GDC last month to catch up on how the process is going, roughly a year into his full-time gig at OtherSide. It was an interesting conversation, especially if you're at all interested in where games are at these days, where they came from, and what sorts of stories they're best at telling."

A Rare Look Inside Nintendo (Otaku / Game Escape / YouTube) "This clip is an excerpt from the French documentary film "Otaku" by director Jean-Jacques Beineix from 1994. It appeared dubbed on German TV some time later, which is the version you are seeing here. It has, to my knowledge, never been released in English. The subtitles are my own. Content is the intellectual property of the original rights holders."

An Interview With One of Those Hackers Screwing With Your 'Black Ops 2' Games(Patrick Klepek / Waypoint) "He's not there to ruin your stats. He's there to sell you software that'll let you launch a DDOS attack from your Xbox 360. [SIMON'S NOTE: this is crazy - modded Xbox 360s that find other player's IP addresses and can DDOS them?! I had no idea.]"

Put a Face on It: The Aesthetics of Cute (Jenny Jiao Hsia / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, Hexecutable's Jenny Jiao Hsia explains why cuteness as an aesthetic may be worth exploring for developers who want to push against current trends in game design."

Proc. Gen. and Pleasant Land | Sir You Are Being Hunted (Robert Seddon / Heterotopias) "It was a perfect rustic idyll, in its way. Perfectly lovely, nestled between the grassy fields. Perfectly quiet, as only dead places can be. Perfectly still, because a player careless enough to create a disturbance might attract the robotic hunters. Big Robot’s Sir You Are Being Hunted had, through the digital governance of its landscape generation algorithms, somehow perfected the British countryside."

How video games were made - part 3: Marketing and Business (Strafefox / YouTube) "In this final chapter we cover the business side and marketing of 8 and 16 bit games. [SIMON'S NOTE: Lots of archival footage in here & SO much work cutting it all together - and the other entries in the 'how video games were made' series look pretty good too!]"

Video Games Are Better Without Stories (Ian Bogost / The Atlantic) "A longstanding dream: Video games will evolve into interactive stories, like the ones that play out fictionally on the Star Trek Holodeck. In this hypothetical future, players could interact with computerized characters as round as those in novels or films, making choices that would influence an ever-evolving plot. [SIMON'S NOTE: lots of responses to this all over the Internet - here's a couple of good ones from the Waypoint folks.]"

'Burnout' Series Creator Talks Remaking Crash Mode for 'Danger Zone' (John Davison / Glixel) "Spend longer than a few minutes talking with fans of driving games about which series they'd love to see revived, and invariably someone will bring up Criterion's Burnout. Unlike contemporaries that were leaning harder into realism and officially-licensed cars as a response to games like Gran Turismo, the first Burnout – released by Acclaim for PlayStation 2 in 2001 – was unapologetically action-focused."

Famitsu Special Report – The Mystery of TOSE (Famitsu / One Million Power) "This is the real story behind TOSE: The game development company that’s been making games for nearly 38 years (since 1979), but hardly any gamers know. [SIMON'S NOTE: Brandon Sheffield covered TOSE for Gamasutra back in 2006, but by and large, they've been PRETTY vague about what they work on - which is fascinating.]"

How Three Kids With No Experience Beat Square And Translated Final Fantasy V Into English (Jason Schreier / Kotaku) "One day in the late 1990s, Myria walked into the Irvine High School computer room and spotted a boy playing Final Fantasy V. There were two unusual things about this. The first was that Final Fantasy V had not actually come out in the United States."

Night in the Woods is Important (HeavyEyed / YouTube) "An analysis of the recently released game - this video contains very minimal spoilers but watch at your own discretion.."

Designing the giant battle royale maps of Playerunknown's Battlegrounds (Alan Bradley / Gamasutra) "For Brendan "Playerunknown" Greene, the creator of Battlegrounds, the vision for his game world was born from extensive experience creating and manipulating environments that direct players to play his games the way he intends them to be played."

All We Have Is Words (Matthew Burns / Magical Wasteland) "Sometimes I give the impression of knowing Japanese, but I really don’t. I have no claim to it. I never made a real study of the language, I don’t know kanji and thus can’t read at all, and even in speech I can’t exchange more than pleasantries or the most rudimentary logistical information. [SIMON'S NOTE: I believe this is a subtle 'subtweet'-style article response to the recent Persona 5 translation furore? Maybe?]"

Changing the Game: What's Next for Anita Sarkeesian (Laura A. Parker / Glixel) "Anita Sarkeesian’s talk at this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco falls at an unfortunate time: 10am on the last day of the conference – a Friday. Most attendees – a mix of indie programmers, mainstream publishing teams and media – are still bleary eyed from the night before. And yet, at five-to-ten, the small room on the third floor of the Moscone Convention Center is standing-room only."

The quest to crack and preserve vintage Apple II software (Leigh Alexander and Iain Chambers / The Guardian Podcast) "Why has the quest to hack old Apple II software become the best hope we have of preserving a part of our cultural history? How do these floppy discs – still turning up in their box-loads – shine a light on the educational philosophies of the 80s? And do a new generation of gamers risk losing whole days of their lives by playing these compelling retro games in their browsers?"

Video Games Help Model Brain’s Neurons (Nick Wingfield / New York Times) "Since November, thousands of people have played the game, “Mozak,” which uses common tricks of the medium — points, leveling up and leader boards that publicly rank the performance of players — to crowdsource the creation of three-dimensional models of neurons."

Longtime 'Star Citizen' Backers Want Its New Referral Contest to Die in a Black Hole (Leif Johnson / Motherboard) "Developers of multiplayer video games often host referral programs encouraging existing players to recruit their friends for a boost in cash flow, and in that regard, the new referral contest from Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium Games isn't much out of the ordinary. The same can't be said of the reactions from the players themselves."

Localization Shenanigans in the Chinese Speaking World (Jung-Sheng Lin / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, IGDShare's Jung-Sheng Lin discusses a wide variety of possible issues that can arise when undertaking Chinese localization for your game. These problems include grappling simplified vs. traditional Chinese, naming problems, UI & fonts, and China-specific policies that may relate to localization, political implications, and more."

Good Game/Tech/History Youtubers (Phoe / Medium) "[SIMON'S NOTE: this got birthed after a conversation I had with Phoe in the Video Game History Foundation Discord chat - he watches a lot of good retro/interesting YouTube, and there's a number of recommendations in here I was unaware of!]

Red Bull TV - Screenland (Red Bull TV) "Plug into the fresh stories within the world of video games and game design. The personal tales, wild new developments, and unexpected genres shed new light on what gaming means in the world now and what it could mean in the future. [SIMON'S NOTE: this is an entire _season_ of gaming documentaries, including with Frank Cifaldi (Video Game History Foundation), UK cult classic Knightmare, and lots more.]"

Tim Schafer tells the story of Amnesia Fortnight (Philippa Warr / RockPaperShotgun) "“I started feeling a little bogged down by the scope of [Brutal Legend],” says Tim Schafer, founder of Double Fine. “It was really huge and I felt like the team had been doing it for a long time and had a long way to go yet. I felt like they needed a break.” That break was Amnesia Fortnight, a two week game jam during which anyone at the developer can pitch an idea and, if it’s selected, lead a team to turn it from concept to working prototype."

The Signal From Tolva: The Best Game Ever (Matt Lees / Cool Ghosts / YouTube) "New video! Matt dives into a spooky robot world, to talk about some of the cool design aspects of The Signal From Tölva. [SIMON'S NOTE: Can't emphasize enough that Cool Ghosts has some of the best game criticism on YouTube. Please patronize them! (On Patreon, not by talking down to them.)"

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to [email protected]. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include a GDC talk on 'the aesthetics of cute', the hidden story of TOSE, & the return to car wrecking of key Burnout developers.

Another interesting week of longer-form 'things', and I've been ruminating a bit on how these videos and articles intersect in weird but neat ways with 'breaking news' or 'hottest games'. Seems like you'll get at least _some_ bleed-through - for example, this week we have Battlegrounds, Signal From Tolva & Night In The Woods again, all of which are newish or interesting releases.

But many of these pieces are evergreen & exist separately of the 'hot reactions' grind. Which is good. Exist too close to the 24-hour hype cycle, and you'll miss trends and more thoughtful takes like some of these good folks. VGDC aims to reverse that. We hope you think we do a good job.

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

Guild Wars 2’s art style passes from father to son (Philippa Warr / RockPaperShotgun) "Recently I had the chance to talk to ArenaNet (and thus Guild Wars 2) art director Horia Dociu about his work at the studio. One of the interesting things about his promotion to the role is that he succeeds his father, Daniel."

We’ve been missing a big part of game industry’s digital revolution (Kyle Orland / Ars Technica) "Last year, the Entertainment Software Association's annual "Essential Facts" report suggested that the US game industry generated $16.5 billion in "content" sales annually (excluding hardware and accessories). In this year's report, that number had grown to a whopping $24.5 billion, a nearly 50-percent increase in a span of 12 months. No, video games didn't actually become half again as popular with Americans over the course of 2016. Instead, tracking firm NPD simply updated the way it counts the still-shadowy world of digital game sales."

Warren Spector believes games 'need to be asking bigger questions' (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "Gamasutra sat down with Spector at GDC last month to catch up on how the process is going, roughly a year into his full-time gig at OtherSide. It was an interesting conversation, especially if you're at all interested in where games are at these days, where they came from, and what sorts of stories they're best at telling."

A Rare Look Inside Nintendo (Otaku / Game Escape / YouTube) "This clip is an excerpt from the French documentary film "Otaku" by director Jean-Jacques Beineix from 1994. It appeared dubbed on German TV some time later, which is the version you are seeing here. It has, to my knowledge, never been released in English. The subtitles are my own. Content is the intellectual property of the original rights holders."

An Interview With One of Those Hackers Screwing With Your 'Black Ops 2' Games(Patrick Klepek / Waypoint) "He's not there to ruin your stats. He's there to sell you software that'll let you launch a DDOS attack from your Xbox 360. [SIMON'S NOTE: this is crazy - modded Xbox 360s that find other player's IP addresses and can DDOS them?! I had no idea.]"

Put a Face on It: The Aesthetics of Cute (Jenny Jiao Hsia / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, Hexecutable's Jenny Jiao Hsia explains why cuteness as an aesthetic may be worth exploring for developers who want to push against current trends in game design."

Proc. Gen. and Pleasant Land | Sir You Are Being Hunted (Robert Seddon / Heterotopias) "It was a perfect rustic idyll, in its way. Perfectly lovely, nestled between the grassy fields. Perfectly quiet, as only dead places can be. Perfectly still, because a player careless enough to create a disturbance might attract the robotic hunters. Big Robot’s Sir You Are Being Hunted had, through the digital governance of its landscape generation algorithms, somehow perfected the British countryside."

How video games were made - part 3: Marketing and Business (Strafefox / YouTube) "In this final chapter we cover the business side and marketing of 8 and 16 bit games. [SIMON'S NOTE: Lots of archival footage in here & SO much work cutting it all together - and the other entries in the 'how video games were made' series look pretty good too!]"

Video Games Are Better Without Stories (Ian Bogost / The Atlantic) "A longstanding dream: Video games will evolve into interactive stories, like the ones that play out fictionally on the Star Trek Holodeck. In this hypothetical future, players could interact with computerized characters as round as those in novels or films, making choices that would influence an ever-evolving plot. [SIMON'S NOTE: lots of responses to this all over the Internet - here's a couple of good ones from the Waypoint folks.]"

'Burnout' Series Creator Talks Remaking Crash Mode for 'Danger Zone' (John Davison / Glixel) "Spend longer than a few minutes talking with fans of driving games about which series they'd love to see revived, and invariably someone will bring up Criterion's Burnout. Unlike contemporaries that were leaning harder into realism and officially-licensed cars as a response to games like Gran Turismo, the first Burnout – released by Acclaim for PlayStation 2 in 2001 – was unapologetically action-focused."

Famitsu Special Report – The Mystery of TOSE (Famitsu / One Million Power) "This is the real story behind TOSE: The game development company that’s been making games for nearly 38 years (since 1979), but hardly any gamers know. [SIMON'S NOTE: Brandon Sheffield covered TOSE for Gamasutra back in 2006, but by and large, they've been PRETTY vague about what they work on - which is fascinating.]"

How Three Kids With No Experience Beat Square And Translated Final Fantasy V Into English (Jason Schreier / Kotaku) "One day in the late 1990s, Myria walked into the Irvine High School computer room and spotted a boy playing Final Fantasy V. There were two unusual things about this. The first was that Final Fantasy V had not actually come out in the United States."

Night in the Woods is Important (HeavyEyed / YouTube) "An analysis of the recently released game - this video contains very minimal spoilers but watch at your own discretion.."

Designing the giant battle royale maps of Playerunknown's Battlegrounds (Alan Bradley / Gamasutra) "For Brendan "Playerunknown" Greene, the creator of Battlegrounds, the vision for his game world was born from extensive experience creating and manipulating environments that direct players to play his games the way he intends them to be played."

All We Have Is Words (Matthew Burns / Magical Wasteland) "Sometimes I give the impression of knowing Japanese, but I really don’t. I have no claim to it. I never made a real study of the language, I don’t know kanji and thus can’t read at all, and even in speech I can’t exchange more than pleasantries or the most rudimentary logistical information. [SIMON'S NOTE: I believe this is a subtle 'subtweet'-style article response to the recent Persona 5 translation furore? Maybe?]"

Changing the Game: What's Next for Anita Sarkeesian (Laura A. Parker / Glixel) "Anita Sarkeesian’s talk at this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco falls at an unfortunate time: 10am on the last day of the conference – a Friday. Most attendees – a mix of indie programmers, mainstream publishing teams and media – are still bleary eyed from the night before. And yet, at five-to-ten, the small room on the third floor of the Moscone Convention Center is standing-room only."

The quest to crack and preserve vintage Apple II software (Leigh Alexander and Iain Chambers / The Guardian Podcast) "Why has the quest to hack old Apple II software become the best hope we have of preserving a part of our cultural history? How do these floppy discs – still turning up in their box-loads – shine a light on the educational philosophies of the 80s? And do a new generation of gamers risk losing whole days of their lives by playing these compelling retro games in their browsers?"

Video Games Help Model Brain’s Neurons (Nick Wingfield / New York Times) "Since November, thousands of people have played the game, “Mozak,” which uses common tricks of the medium — points, leveling up and leader boards that publicly rank the performance of players — to crowdsource the creation of three-dimensional models of neurons."

Longtime 'Star Citizen' Backers Want Its New Referral Contest to Die in a Black Hole (Leif Johnson / Motherboard) "Developers of multiplayer video games often host referral programs encouraging existing players to recruit their friends for a boost in cash flow, and in that regard, the new referral contest from Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium Games isn't much out of the ordinary. The same can't be said of the reactions from the players themselves."

Localization Shenanigans in the Chinese Speaking World (Jung-Sheng Lin / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, IGDShare's Jung-Sheng Lin discusses a wide variety of possible issues that can arise when undertaking Chinese localization for your game. These problems include grappling simplified vs. traditional Chinese, naming problems, UI & fonts, and China-specific policies that may relate to localization, political implications, and more."

Good Game/Tech/History Youtubers (Phoe / Medium) "[SIMON'S NOTE: this got birthed after a conversation I had with Phoe in the Video Game History Foundation Discord chat - he watches a lot of good retro/interesting YouTube, and there's a number of recommendations in here I was unaware of!]

Red Bull TV - Screenland (Red Bull TV) "Plug into the fresh stories within the world of video games and game design. The personal tales, wild new developments, and unexpected genres shed new light on what gaming means in the world now and what it could mean in the future. [SIMON'S NOTE: this is an entire _season_ of gaming documentaries, including with Frank Cifaldi (Video Game History Foundation), UK cult classic Knightmare, and lots more.]"

Tim Schafer tells the story of Amnesia Fortnight (Philippa Warr / RockPaperShotgun) "“I started feeling a little bogged down by the scope of [Brutal Legend],” says Tim Schafer, founder of Double Fine. “It was really huge and I felt like the team had been doing it for a long time and had a long way to go yet. I felt like they needed a break.” That break was Amnesia Fortnight, a two week game jam during which anyone at the developer can pitch an idea and, if it’s selected, lead a team to turn it from concept to working prototype."

The Signal From Tolva: The Best Game Ever (Matt Lees / Cool Ghosts / YouTube) "New video! Matt dives into a spooky robot world, to talk about some of the cool design aspects of The Signal From Tölva. [SIMON'S NOTE: Can't emphasize enough that Cool Ghosts has some of the best game criticism on YouTube. Please patronize them! (On Patreon, not by talking down to them.)"

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to [email protected]. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]