#locus other time | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

pandoraslxna · 4 months

Note

Luna love PLEASEEEEE HEAR ME OUT‼️ Dilf!Jake getting mad at human!reader when he catches her on her room in the science lab using toys instead of him (that are not even close to his length btw), and fucking her dumb. Like fucking some senses to her, with degradation kink pretty please?

Pent up and stressed out

Jake Sully x female human reader

Words: 3.7k

Summary: Jake knows just the way to help you relief some of that pent up frustration.

Warnings: explicit smut, use of toys, caught masturbating, age difference, size difference, p in v, oral, degradation, praise, dirty talk, use of daddy (once), brat tamer dilf!jake

It was the melting-pot of earths greatest minds, a central locus for innovation and invention, a modern day renaissance. It was where scientists went to work on the next next best thing, before the next best thing had even arrived. It was where everyone who was anyone in the scientific community would go to start a new life and get their hands dirty on real science. And of course, the science at the RDA’s Laboratories was very real –and very dangerous. But what's life without risks? If life gives you lemons, use the decaying remains of those lemons to invent the best damn anti-lemon device possible! (And maybe colonize the poor Lemon farmers home too, while you’re at it.)

Well, at least, that was the marketing for Pandora. And to be honest, in the very beginning it was this ideal (and quirky) view of how the RDA worked that you had fallen in love with all those years ago when you worked there as an intern. That was, before you figured what these limb dicks were actually doing here.

Of course they don’t tell you about that war stuff back on earth. They don’t tell you about the natives, the blood that will stick on your hands, the flora and fauna they promised you to study to be burned to ashes because apparently mankind needs apartments and streets and fucking beer on this exomoon.

You were tired of how things worked. You were tired of the long hours, of snappy managers, of being shuffled from lab to lab for no apparent reason, of working on projects for six months at a time and then being told they were cancelled –and sometimes finding out later that some of them had been handed to a different scientific team. You were tired of how cavalier some of the higher-ups seemed about handling dangerous technology and killing innocents. And you were tired of the secrecy about this insanely morally wrong war.

That’s when you had decided to switch sides. Of course switching to the human / na‘vi revolution might’ve been the morally correct way, but what they don’t show you in the contract is, that this path doesn’t come with the luxury of working at high technology laboratories with dozens and dozens of other scientists to share this massive amount of work with. It doesn’t come with unlimited food, water, electricity and other much needed resources. Oh and remind me, who was complaining about the long hours at the RDA earlier? Yeah, that was pretty much nothing, compared to the fact that you hadn’t touched your bed in forty-nine hours.

Life on Pandora had definitely not been what you had expected when you first arrived here. The only difference now was, that you now did it with pleasure instead of guilt.

Working in the labs at high camp was probably the best thing that could’ve happened to you, but doing the right things never comes easy.

Sure, it took a while to get used to the power running out every few days and having to bath in a river, eating whatever the forest gives and oh, let’s not forget the eight feet tall, blue teenagers lingering around in your work space accompanied by a half naked tarzan with painted on stripes, making it extremely difficult to focus on your work.

Speaking of concentration…

"Kid, why the hell are you still here?"

"Huh, w-what?" You awoke with a start, and for a moment you didn't know where you even were. Your neck hurt as you lifted it up, rubbing the sleep away in your tired eyes only to be met with a pair of blue, muscular thighs standing right in front of your desk. Immediately, your gaze shoots all the way up.

“I said, why the hell are you still here?", Jake furrows his brows as he glares down at you, crossing his arms over his chest. "It's almost 3 am and this is the second night in a row that I catch you in here. Go. home."

"Jake we talked about this before", you roll your eyes at him, pushing away from the desk to walk over to where some of the scientists lockers stand. "I‘ll go, once I get this shit done." You make a gesture in the air to point at the petridish on your desk, with five ar'lek seeds inside. The healing potential of those seeds was something you’ve always took great interest in, especially during times where more of this medicine was needed than the Na‘vi could even harvest.

"No, you’re leaving right now", the clans Olo'eyktan and former marine said sternly. "No damn plant can be this important you’re loosing two days of sleep over it."

"Oh tell me about it…", you mumbled under your breath as you fiddled with the lock, flung the door open and reached for a small blue container. You unscrewed the lid and tipped the container ever so slightly. Out onto your outstretched hand popped two capsules, their smooth surface reflecting the fluorescent lights placed far above you. Down you gulped them, and up reached a hand to grasp a bottle of water. You took a swig.

Another day, another pill, another length of sanity in a place of madness.

The na‘vi behind you quirks a brow, "What was that?"

"Uh, this?", you shake the blue container and the pills inside rattle demonstrative. "Norm bought them from the raid last week. It’s a food substitutes. Helps me concentrate."

Caffeine in a pill, basically.

Jake let’s out a heavy sigh as he circles the desk and approaches you, the equipment and furniture around him looking comically small.

"You don’t needs pills, kid", he says, taking the container from you and placing in inside the locker a little harder than necessary to bring his point across. He’s towering over you without even trying, and you have to crane your neck all the way up to properly look at him. "What you need is sleep and a way to relief of all of that pent up stress. You’re here all the time, do you even eat? Have some time for yourself? When’s the last time you took a shower, huh?"

God, this man was a dad through and through.

You didn’t know if it was the difference in age or just his general authority, but whatever it was that made him talk to you like you were nothing but a fussy teenager, it was getting on your nerves. Even more than usually.

"Ha-ha very funny. Next you tell me to go visit a spa over the weekend. Oh, thanks boss that’s so kind of you for giving me a couple of days off", your voice had turned into a mocking tone, which makes both of his eyebrows raise in amusement. He cocks his head to the side, waiting for you to keep going, but your gaze only drops in embarrassment. "Leave me alone, Jake. I’ve got work to do…"

"See, that’s exactly what I’m talking about", he chuckles and shakes his head, pinching the bridge of his nose.

"What?" You almost bark at him.

"You’re pent up. Quit acting like a little brat, go home and take care of it. Or I will."

Take care of it. Jake’s words whispered over and over and over in your head, a rolling loop that you thought might actually drive you insane. It’s not like you didn’t try, you really did. But as tempting as your bed might seemed to you, as tired as you were when you dragged yourself back to hells gate, you just couldn’t rest, couldn’t will yourself to sleep.

You’ve always spent your days with your mind full to the brim with various theories, studies and seemingly endless responsibilities, so much so that you often found it difficult to empty your mind for sleep. Sometimes you would recite the na’vi names of plants to yourself in your head ("Panopyra, Pamtseowll, puríhsa..."), over and over, like counting sheep, trying to memorize their names. You would take a quick jog around the building, read a book or sometimes even meditate. But some other times you simply preferred another method of relaxation.

Take care of it. Or I will.

He could be so insufferable when he was bossing you around, you thought to yourself with a heavy sigh as you let your hands run down your curves, feeling the soft swell of your breasts, over your stomach and the hem of your pyjama shirt.

"Is that an order, sir?", you grumble to yourself, mentally rolling your eyes at him as your fingers skim past the waistband of your shorts.

But eywa bless him to whatever heaven existed, this man was truly gifted with a body that served as material for your wettest dreams and dirtiest fantasies more than once before.

There had to be some rule against woman finding men around their fathers age hot. Men whose authority made them ten times more attractive, but just as annoying when they were treating you like a kid. Men that were exotic and alien and blue and tall and— There had to be some law that– that could protect you from the man that Jake Sully was. There had to be something in the books about dealing with this, with him. Especially if the only way you knew how to deal with whatever feelings you harbored for the much older ex-marine, was with busying your hands between your spread thighs.

Instantly, there’s this sensation, hot and burning and you allow it to rise within your core— allow it, and welcome it. You exhale softly, and the slick, wet feeling under your fingertips gives you a gratifying sense of accomplishment, fueling you to circle over your clit, gentle at first, but slowly adding more pressure over time. Your other hand clasps over your mouth, barely able to stifle a moan as the other finger that had been teasing your entrance slowly slips inside.

Breathlessly, you feel your head dip back further, as you recognize the heat slowly building, radiating from your core. Gyrating your hips, the feeling of wetness and pleasure builds within yourself, enough to make your hips buck up against your own hands. Thrusting your fingers in and out, you huff out a frustrated breath when you realize it’s not nearly enough to take the edge off.

Withdrawing your hands, you reach for your nightstand and pull the upper drawer open. It reveals a set of various toys, different colors and sizes, and you don’t need to think twice before you grab the biggest one and settle yourself back into the comfort of your pillow. It’s a blue dildo. Of-fucking-course.

It takes a few tries, the tension slips for a moment or two, but soon, you find the right angle to allow the slippery toy to slip inside and caress the spot you‘ve been seeking. More pleasure begins to wash over you, not unlike waves washing ashore, as you build up the tension your body craves you to chase. Your fingertips run in circles over your clit as you push the toy inside and angle it up, dragging the silicon tip along your soft, spongy walls and you moan, loud and wanton.

Your toes curl tightly as you approach what might just be the state of bliss you‘ve been seeking. The verge of Nirvana, quite literally, at your fingertips. Inhaling sharply, you feel that pleasure intensify and spread throughout your entire body. Your toes curl tighter, though you’re only vaguely aware of it for a moment.

Squeezing your eyes shut, your head lolls from side to side, before you pry your eyes open and glance between your spread thighs. The toy glistens in your arousal when you pull it out and your legs quiver when you push it back inside. In your lustful haze, it takes a few more thrusts, and then your eyes finally land on the door in front of your bed; widen open, with a big blue silhouette leaning against the metal frame, arms crossed over his chest and head tilted to the side in his telltale stance.

Your movements stop altogether.

"J-Jake!?" You shriek, clenching your thighs shut.

"Hey, sweetheart", he grins lazily, then pushes off the doorframe to approach you.

"What are you–"

"Thought I’d check on you", he cuts you off and the sway of his tail behind his back reminds you of a cat that just caught a mouse. "See if you arrived home safe and sound, and took care of that little problem how I told you to."

The mattress then dips as he puts a knee on top of it and reaches for your ankle. You squeak when he pulls your towards him with barely any effort, then spreads your thighs with his entirely too big hands on either one of your legs.

"Looks like you needed it bad, huh?", he chuckles and a deep flush of embarrassment settles on your face when he twists the toy inside you and then gently pulls it out. "But you could’ve just asked, you know? Instead of using these pathetic little toys. No wonder you’re always this pent up when that’s what you’re using."

The toys is tossed aside before you can open your mouth to object, your chest heaving in frantic pants as he kneels onto your bed with a creak of your old mattress.

"Jake..?", you whisper, the sudden, uncertain tone in your voice making him lick his lips in anticipation as you pushed yourself up on your elbows.

"Shhh, let daddy take care of you, yeah? Gonna relief some of that stress so my little brat knows how to behave again. That sound good?", he asked, with a fucking smug shit-eating grin. If only your face wasn’t bright red in flustered embarrassment, Jake would’ve taken the provocative roll of your eyes more seriously as you let yourself fall back against the sheets.

"Not a brat…", you mumble, but your eyebrows are only knit together for a second before they shoot up in surprise when grabs the underside of your knees and folds your legs so your ankles almost touch your ears. "F-Fucking, sh– ah!" The moan breaks out of you in a wheezed curse the very moment Jake’s tongue goes flat between your wet folds and his lips close around your clit.

He starts rather roughly, sucking hard on that little bundle of nerves until tears prick at the corner of your eyes. His tongue dips down to lap at your arousal, groaning against you as he pushes past your entrance and fucks you on his tongue. Your moans turn into wails, legs helplessly twitching as he keeps them bend to devour you.

You couldn’t hold out for long, not against the way he knowingly toyed with you, suckling and flicking over your clit, the strange growl he made between filthy slurps vibrating against it. You heard your own voice, a soft river of sounds, murmuring words that weren’t words, curses and moans as you felt the release start to pool in your belly, hot and tingling and restless. Until you couldn’t fight it anymore, thighs trembling around his face and you came with a gasp of his name.

But Jake doesn’t stop, doesn’t stop until your shaking from overstimulation, until your slick is running down his chin and even then, a desperate sound of frustration escapes you when he finally lifts his head up from between your thighs. The waves of your first orgasm had barely subsided, just to the point where your limbs felt heavy, your body drained and wrung out, but it wasn’t enough. You needed more, and it made him laugh, how needy you are.

"Noo", you complain, "don’t– don’t stop!"

"Ah, don’t worry sweetheart I’m only getting started", Jake promises with a dirty smile, shuffling his hips closer to yours before he pulls down his loincloth just enough to reveal his throbbing cock. There’s a certain glint in his eyes as he watches you swallow thickly at the sight. Fuck, he’s big.

"Been acting like such a desperate slut, rolling your eyes at me and talking back under your breath", he says lowly. Jake keeps you in this bend position, but takes hold of his cock at the very base before he drags his tip through your spit and arousal slicked folds. "Should’ve already put you in your place weeks ago", he goes on, "But I knew you just needed your needy little holes filled by a big cock, right?" He pauses for a second, and then you feel the mushroom-like tip prodding against your entrance. "Needed to be fucked like the slut you are. Don‘t worry, doll face. M‘gonna fuck you right to sleep, help you relax reaaal good." And then he pushes inside.

The stretch makes you choke on a scream that threatens to rise through your body and Jake groans at the suffocating heat around his length. "Shit baby, still so fuckin‘ tight, ain’t ya?"

Your hands reach out for his biceps, short nails digging into his skin, sinking crescents into the blue stripes on his arm, your whole body quivering, mind fuzzed with a long-forgotten drowsy sort of bliss.

"Feel me stretching you out? Those damn toys didn’t even loosen you up one bit." Jake grins. His lips are on yours then, his mouth claiming, and he swallows any sounds you might have made as you fit together like a hand in a too-small glove.

He moves, only a little, the springs groan and squeak as he rolls his hips, slow at first, then faster. Your lips are bruised by the time he breaks the kiss and his shoulders are scratched and he’s somehow even deeper, and then his thrusts turn harder.

He’s hot and heavy on top of you and it’s making you tingle and shiver all over.

Jake fucks you with precision, the tip of his cock hammers against your cervix, dragging along your g-spot on the way and it makes your eyes roll all the back inside your head.

"Yeah, that’s how it’s supposed to feel", he chuckles, the sound cutting off into a low groan as he licks away the spit from your bottom lip. "Look at my little slut drooling fr‘me."

Your wet, velvety-like walls are heavenly, warm and constricting him and getting even tighter when he increases his pace. In no time, you were all but melting in his hold, moaning out nonsense that was like music to his ears. Every time Jake’s cock brushed against your g-spot, your moans turned louder and your toes curled into your soles.

"Jesus, baby. You feel so good around me, perfect little cock sleeve."

The sounds he knocked out of you with the sheer force of his thrusts soon turn needy and higher pitched, as he was driving you over the edge faster than you could even proceed it.

"T-There, fuck Jake, right- right there", you mewl, sucking in your bottom lip between your teeth. The man above you groans, half a grin pulling at the corner of his lips before he aims his hips to hit that spongey spot inside you even harder.

"Where, here? That your special spot, hm?"

"Uh-huh, yes! Yes, fucking shi– oh my god!" Your walls pulsate around him, squeezing and clenching his shaft. God, you were so close it almost hurt.

"Hmh, can feel you clenching, baby. You like it that much?", Jake chuckled, and you could only muster the strength to nod weakly. "Gonna come fr‘me, yeah?"

His hips only increased their pace from there, taking you harder, hands holding you tighter, tail coiling around your ankle to spread your legs impossibly wider and you felt so full, it was hard to imagine that there was any more room inside you, not even for his cum. And that thought alone was enough to tip you over the edge with a full body shiver.

His name falls from your spit slicked lips in incoherent brabbles and moans, greedily pleading for more, more more, until—

"Coming! I‘m coming!"

"Look at you", Jake mutters and he sounds so wrecked, so reverent and pleased with himself. "Gorgeous, so pretty when you come on my cock, sweetheart. You needed this, didn’t you? Good girl, you’re doing so good.”

Jake certainly knows what he’s talking about because if only there was a mirror where you could see yourself– You looked completely obscene, folded like a little pretzel, skin flushed with exertion and sheened with sweat while your hair is matted on your forehead. There’s saliva pooling at the corners of your mouth from where you had been unashamedly panting, lips red and plump from kissing and sucking on his tongue.

“My perfect little slut.” Jake pants out, snapping his hips ruthlessly into you, helping you ride out your orgasm.

Jesus, you were a real sight. It makes his balls tighten up and his cock throb inside you.

He was drinking up every sweet little moan and gasp he elicited out of you like this, groaning, before he finally pumped you full of his hot cum, until it leaked out around his girth. "Oh, fuck", Jake murmured and he sounded so far away, thick and rough. Your pussy squelched as he continued to lazily thrust into you. He groans, shattered, hips fucking erratically until they still deep inside you and the tight walls of your cunt milk his cock until he’s completely spent.

It’s only now that you realize how god damn heavy this man was on top of you. Thankfully Jake rolled off before you had to start gasping too badly for air, leaving your front feeling impossibly cold.

"And? Feeling relaxed?" He chuckled, rolling over to pull the blanket over the both of you before he tugs you close against his chest.

"Shut up…", you make out roughly and it’s only then that you realize, you had screamed yourself hoarse. You want to roll your eyes at him, but they unwillingly flutter closed before you can even try to.

"Told ya‘ I’ll fuck you to sleep, kid."

#atwow #Avatar #Jake sully #jake sully x female reader smut #jake sully x reader #jake sully x reader smut #jake sully x y/n #jake sully x you #jake sully x human!reader #dilf!jake sully #avatar the way of water #Avatar 2 #jake sully avatar #jake sully #jake sully smut

1K notes · View notes

neil-gaiman · 1 year

Note

Sir, if you don't mind us asking, how did you deal with toxic teachers/mentors back when you were still a student, if you had any? We had a French test today, and my teacher was convinced I copied it off the internet, because, and I quote, I "couldn't possibly know certain words or tenses." I offered to write another essay, in front of him this time, so there was no way for me to copy anything off anyone. Then I read it out to him. He didn't look at all happy. I'm wondering if he's going to pose a problem for me later. Do you have any words of advice on ways to handle this or other situations like this?

Nothing at all, other than, you won't always be at school, and this is not a permanent condition.

Signed

the person whose 1976 Mock A-Level Essay was marked down from an A to a C on the basis that it was too original and I must have plagiarised it. And who in 2010 went back to the idea from that essay and won the 2011 Locus Award for Best Short Story with it.

3K notes · View notes

fuckyeahgoodomens · 2 months

Text

The Radio Times magazine from the 29 July-04 August 2023 :)

THE SECOND COMING

How did Terry Pratchett and Neil gaiman overcome the small matter of Pratchett's death to make another series of their acclaimed divine comedy?

For all the dead authors in the world,” legendary comedy producer John Lloyd once said, “Terry Pratchett is the most alive.” And he’s right. Sir Terry is having an extremely busy 2023… for someone who died in 2015.

This week sees the release of Good Omens 2, the second series of Amazon’s fantasy comedy drama based on the cult novel Pratchett co-wrote with Neil Gaiman in the late 1980s. This will be followed in the autumn by a new spin-off book from Pratchett’s Discworld series, Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch, co-written by Pratchett’s daughter Rhianna and children’s author Gabrielle Kent. The same month, we’ll also get A Stroke of the Pen, a collection of “lost” short stories written by Sir Terry for local newspapers in the 70s and 80s and recently rediscovered. Clearly, while there are no more books coming from Pratchett – a hard drive containing all drafts and unpublished work was crushed by a vintage steamroller shortly after the author’s death, as per his specific wishes – people still want to visit his vivid and addictive worlds in new ways.

Good Omens 2 will be the first test of how this can work. The original book started life as a 5,000-word short story by Gaiman, titled William the Antichrist and envisioned as a bit of a mashup of Richmal Crompton’s Just William books and the 70s horror classic The Omen. What would happen, Gaiman had mused, if the spawn of Satan had been raised, not by a powerful American diplomat, but by an extremely normal couple in an idyllic English village, far from the influence of hellish forces? He’d sent the first draft to bestselling fantasy author Pratchett, a friend of many years, and then forgotten about it as he busied himself with continuing to write his massively popular comic books, including Violent Cases, Black Orchid and The Sandman, which became a Netflix series last year.

Pratchett loved the idea, offering to either buy the concept from Gaiman or co-write it. It was, as Gaiman later said, “like Michelangelo phoning and asking if you want to paint a ceiling” The pair worked on the book together from that point on, rewriting each other as they went and communicating via long phone calls and mailed floppy discs. “The actual mechanics worked like this: I would do a bit, then Neil would take it away and do a bit more and give it back to me,” Pratchett told Locus magazine in 1991. “We’d mess about with each other’s bits and pieces.”

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch – to give it its full title –was published in 1990 to huge acclaim. It was one of, astonishingly, five Terry Pratchett novels to be published that year (he averaged two a year, including 41 Discworld novels and many other standalone works and collaborations).

It was also, clearly, extremely filmable, and studios came knocking — though getting it made took a while. rnvo decades on from its writing, four years after Pratchett's death from Alzheimer's disease aged 66, and after several doomed attempts to get a movie version off the ground, Good Omens finally made it to TV screens in 2019, scripted and show-run by Gaiman himself. "Terry was egging me on to make it into television. He knew he was dying, and he knew that I wouldn't start it without him," Gaiman revealed in a 2019 Radio Times interview. Amazon and the BBC co-produced with Pratchett's company Narrativia and Gaiman's Blank Corporation production studios, with Michael Sheen and David Tennant cast in the central roles of Aziraphale the angel and Crowley the demon. The show was a hit, not just with fans of its two creators, but with a whole new young audience, many of whom had no interest in Discworld or Sandman. Social media networks like Tumblr and TikTok were soon awash with cosplay, artwork and fan fiction. The original novel became, for the first time, a New York Times bestseller.

A follow up was, on one level, a no-brainer. The world Pratchett and Gaiman had created was vivid, funny and accessible, and Tennant and Sheen had found an intriguing romantic spark in their chemistry not present in the novel.

There was, however, a huge problem. There wasn't a second Good Omens book to base it on. But there was the ghost of an idea.

In 1989, after the book had been sold but before it had come out, the two authors had laid on fivin beds in a hotel room at a convention in Seattle and, jet-lagged and unable to sleep, plotted out, in some detail, what would happen in a sequel, provisionally titled 668, The II Neighbour of the Beast.

"It was a good one, too" Gaiman wrote in a 2021 blog. "We fully intended to write it, whenever we next had three or four months free. Only I went to live in America and Terry stayed in the UK, and after Good Omens was published, Sandman became SANDMAN and Discworld became DISCWORLD(TM) and there wasn't a good time."

Back in 1991, Pratchett elaborated, "We even know some of the main characters in it. But there's a huge difference between sitting there chatting away, saying, 'Hey, we could do this, we could do that,' and actually physically getting down and doing it all again." In 2019, Gaiman pillaged some of those ideas for Good Omens series one (for example, its final episode wasn't in the book at all), and had left enough threads dangling to give him an opening for a sequel. This is the well he's returned to for Good Omens 2, co-writing with comic John Finnemore - drafted in, presumably, to plug the gap left Pratchett's unparalleled comedic mind. No small task.

Projects like Good Omens 2 are an important proving ground for Pratchett's legacy: can the universes he conjured endure without their creator? And can they stay true to his spirit? Sir Terry was famously protective of his creations, and there have been remarkably few adaptations of his work considering how prolific he was. "What would be in it for me?" he asked in 2003. "Money? I've got money."

He wanted his work treated reverently and not butchered for the screen. It's why Good Omens and projects like Tiffany Aching's Guide to Being a Witch are made with trusted members of the inner circle like Neil Gaiman and Rhianna Pratchett at the helm. It's also why the author's estate, run by Pratchett's former assistant and business manager Rob Wilkins, keeps a tight rein on any licensed Pratchett material — it's a multi-million dollar media empire still run like a cottage industry.

And that's heartening. Anyone who saw BBC America's panned 2021 Pratchett adaptation The Watch will know how badly these things can go when a studio is allowed to run amok with the material without oversight. These stories deserve to be told, and these worlds deserve to be explored — properly. And there are, apparently, many plans afoot for more Pratchett on the screen. You can only hope that, somewhere, he'll be proud of the results.

After all, as he wrote himself, "No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away, until the clock wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone's life is only the core of their actual existence."

While those ripples continue to spread, Sir Terry Pratchett remains very much alive. MARC BURROWS

DIVINE DUO

An angel and a demon walk into a pub... Michael Sheen and David Tennant on family, friendship and Morecambe & Wise

Outside it's cold winter's day and we're in a Scottish studio, somewhere between Edinburgh and Glasgow. But inside it's lunchtime in The Dirty Donkey pub in the heart of London, with both Michael Sheen and David Tennant surveying the scene appreciatively. "This is a great pub," says Sheen eagerly, while Tennant calls it "the best Soho there can be. A slightly heightened, immaculate, perfect, dreamy Soho."

Here, a painting of the absent landlord — the late Terry Pratchett, co-creator, with Neil Gaiman, of the series' source novel — looms over punters. Around the corner is AZ Fell and Co Antiquarian and Unusual Books. It's the bookshop owned by Sheen's character, the angel Aziraphale, and the place to where Tennant's demon Crowley is inevitably drawn.

It's day 74 of an 80-day shoot for a series that no one, least of all the leading actors, ever thought would happen, due to the fact that Pratchett and Gaiman hadn't ever published any sequel to their 1990 fantasy satire. Tennant explains, "What we didn't know was that Neil and Terry had had plots and plans..."

Still, lots of good things are in Good Omens 2, which expands on the millennia-spanning multiverse of the first series. These include a surprisingly naked side of John Hamm, and roles for both Tennant's father-in-law (Peter Davison) and 21-year-old son Ty. At its heart, though, remains the brilliant banter between the two leading men — as Sheen puts it, "very Eric and Ernie !" — whose chemistry on the first series led to one of the more surprising saviours of lockdown telly.

Good Omens is back — but you've worked together a lot in the meantime. Was there a connective tissue between series one of Good Omens and Staged, your lockdown sitcom?

David: Only in as much as the first series went out, then a few months later, we were all locked in our houses. And because of the work we'd done on Good Omens, it occurred that we might do something else. I mean, Neil Gaiman takes full responsibility for Staged. Which, to some extent, he's probably right to do!

Michael: We've got to know each other through doing this. Our lives have gotten more entwined in all kinds of ways — we have children who've now become friends, and our families know each other.

There have been hints of a romantic storyline between the two characters. How much of an undercurrent is that in this series.

David: Nothing's explicit.

Michael: I felt from the very beginning that part of what would be interesting to explore is that Aziraphale is a character, a being, who just loves. How does that manifest itself in a very specific relationship with another being? Inevitably, as there is with everything in this story, there's a grey area. The fact that people see potentially a "romantic relationship", I thought that was interesting and something to explore.

There was a petition to have the first series banned because of its irreverent take on Christian tropes. Series two digs even more deeply into the Bible with the story of Job. How much of a badge of honour is it that the show riles the people who like to ban things?

David: It's not an irreligious show at all. It's actually very respectful of the structure of that sort of religious belief. The idea that it promotes Satanism [is nonsense]. None of the characters from hell are to be aspired to at all! They're a dreadful bunch of non-entities. People are very keen to be offended, aren't they? They're often looking for something to glom on to without possibly really examining what they think they're complaining about.

Michael, you're known as an activist, and you're in the middle of Making BBC drama The Way, which "taps into the social and political chaos of today's world". Is it important for you to use your plaform to discuss causes you believe in?

Michael: The Way is not a political tract, it's just set in the area that I come from. But it has to matter to you, doesn't it? More and more as I get older, [I find] it can be a real slog doing this stuff. You've got to enjoy it. And if it doesn't matter to you, then it's just going to be depressing.

David, Michael has declared himself a "not-for-profit" actor. Has he tried to persuade you to give up all your money too?

David: What an extraordinary question! One is always aware that one has a certain responsibility if one is fortunate and gets to do a job that often doesn't feel like a job. You want to do your bit whenever you can. But at the same time, I'm an actor. I'm not about to give that up to go into politics or anything. But I'll do what I can from where I live.

Well, your son and your father-in-law are also starring in this series. How about that, jobs for the boys!

David: I know! It was a delight to get to be on set with them. And certainly an unexpected one for me. Neil, on two occasions, got to bowl up to me and say, "Guess who we've cast?!"

How do you feel about your US peers going on strike?

David: It's happening because there are issues that need to be addressed. Nobody's doing this lightly. These are important issues, and they've got to be sorted out for the future of our industry. There's this idea that writers and actors are all living high on the hog. For huge swathes of our industry, that's just not the case. These people have got to be protected.

Michael: We have to be really careful that things don't slide back to the way they were pre the 1950s, when the stories that we told were all coming from one point of view and the stories of certain people, or communities within our society, weren't represented. There's a sense that now that's changed for ever and it'll never go back. But you worry when people can't afford to have the opportunities that other people have. We don't want the story that we tell about ourselves to be myopic. You want it to be as inclusive as possible

Staged series 3 recently broadcast. It felt like the show's last hurrah — or is there more mileage? Sheen and Tennant go on holiday?

David: That's the Christmas special! One Foot in the Algarve! On the Buses Go to Spain!

Michael: I don't think we were thinking beyond three, were we?

So is it time for a conscious uncoupling for you two — Eric and Ernie say goodbye?

David: Oh, never say never, will we?

Michael: And it's more Hinge and Bracket.

David: Maybe that's what we do next — The Hinge and Bracket Story. CRAIG McLEAN

884 notes · View notes

dduane · 6 months

Text

The Young Wizards series turns 40!

...And yes, we're having a sale to celebrate. But that can wait. :)

I'm sitting here looking at the date and considering how amazing it is that, despite the changes in the publishing world, anything can stay in print nonstop for forty years.

But this book has. Here's how it started:

...Well, not how it started. It started with three things:

A newbie YA writer being deeply annoyed with a non-newbie one for (as she thought) stripping their teenage characters of their agency without good reason.

A suddenly-appearing joke involving two terms or concepts that wouldn't normally appear together: the 1950s young-readers' series of careers books with titles that always began So You Want To Be A..., and the word "wizard."

And the idea immediately springing from that juxtaposition. What if there was such a book? Not a careers book, but a book that told you how to be a wizard—maybe some kind of manual? One that would tell you the truth about the magic underlying the universe, and how to get your hands on it... assuming you felt you could promise the things that power would demand of you, and survive the Ordeal that would follow?

Six or seven months after that confluence of events, there was a novel with that joke-line as its title. A month or so after that, the novel was bought. So You Want To Be A Wizard came out as a Fall 1983 book, as you can see from the Locus Magazine ad above (from back when Locus was only a paper zine). The first reviews were encouraging.

And by the middle of 1984, the publishers were asking, "So, what's next?" A question I'm still busy answering.

There's been a lot of water under the wizardly bridge since. In SYWTBAW's case, this involved a couple/few publishers, a surprising number of covers, a fair number of awards here and there; and lots more books. (I always knew there'd be more, but how many more continues to surprise me. Which is a bit funny, considering how much stuff that universe has going on in it.)

So here we are at forty, and looking ahead to The Big Five-Oh with some interest. More books? Absolutely. Young Wizards #11 is in progress at the moment, and YW #12 is in the late concept stages. More covers for So You Want To Be A Wizard? Seems inevitable. A TV series, perhaps? (shrug) Stranger things have happened: we'll keep our fingers (or other manipulatory instrumentalities) crossed. The New Millennium Editions in translation? and in international paperback? Working on that right now. The sky's the limit.*

And meanwhile, to celebrate, just for today we'll have a sale. (Except in the UK. To our British friends, the usual sad apology: the expensive bureaucracy of Brexit has made it impossible for us to sell directly to you any more. Details here, with our apologies.)

As has been mentioned before, changes are afoot at Ebooks Direct, so this kind of sale won't be happening again for the foreseeable future. (In fact I thought we were all done with them already. But the number 40 suggested one last opportunity that wouldn't be recurring, so I thought, "Aah, what the heck? Let's.")

New things first! Today, to mark this occasion, we're introducing the "All The Wizardry" Bundle. This is Ebook Direct's entire inventory of Young Wizards works; the contents of the bundle are listed on its product page. The $29.99 price listed there is for today only, to celebrate SYWTBAW's birthday, and will go up as of 23:59 Hawai'ian time tonight. As always, should you ever lose your ebooks or need to change reading platforms, we'll change your formats as necessary, or replace the books, for free.

Just click here, or on the image below, for the "All The Wizardry" Bundle. (Please ignore the category listings under the "Pay Using..." icons on the product page: they plainly think they're in a different universe. Kind of an occupational hazard around here...)

The other, older kind of sale folks will have seen here is on the "I Want Everything You've Got" Bundle, which is the whole Ebooks Direct store—obviously including all the Young Wizards books as well: more than 2.5 million words in 36 DRM-free ebooks. Just for today, in honor of the birthday book, we're dropping the whole-store price to USD $40.00. This, too, will go away just before midnight Hawai'ian time tonight... and it will never be lower. So if you want everything we've got at that price, don't wait around.

Make sure you use this link or the one associated with the image to get the baked-in discount at checkout. (If it fails to display correctly, use the discount code "40FOR40" in the checkout's "discount code or gift code" field.)

Meanwhile? Onward into the next decade. The new A Day at the Crossings novel unfortunately won't make it out before the end of 2023; other work in-house currently has taken priority. But as for early 2024... stay tuned.

And for those of you who're Young Wizards readers, and have kept this book, and its sequels, alive for pushing half a century?

Thank you, again and always!

*Though actually, it's not, is it? As the proverb has it, "Wizardry doesn't stop at atmosphere's edge..."

#Young Wizards series #Young Wizards meta #So You Want To Be A Wizard #ebooks #Diane Duane

762 notes · View notes

cacaitos · 2 years

Text

always wondered why was grunbeld the one that got to get a novel for his backstory, like he’s the most random stray from the neo-hawks lol

#txt #like locus and sonia are grffth's closest um. comrades if you can call it that. zodd is zodd. irvine is also neutral but he's like. second #or third closest to sonia. but they already have the knighly character and the fierce warrior character. who aside from that one time w #sonia and that fight w gts has he interacted with lel. sure he's enormous which can come to be useful but other than that??#in general why him outta all characters in brsrk

0 notes

mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

Text

Social Quitting

In “Social Quitting,” my latest Locus Magazine column, I advance a theory to explain the precipitous vibe shift in how many of us view the once-dominant social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter, and how it is that we have so quickly gone asking what we can do to get these services out of our lives to where we should go now that we’re all ready to leave them:

https://locusmag.com/2023/01/commentary-cory-doctorow-social-quitting/

The core of the argument revolves around surpluses — that is, the value that exists in the service. For a user, surpluses are things like “being able to converse with your friends” and “being able to plan activities with your friends.” For advertisers, surpluses are things like “being able to target ads based on the extraction and processing of private user data” and “being able to force users to look at ads before they can talk to one another.”

For the platforms, surpluses are things like, “Being able to force advertisers and business customers to monetize their offerings through the platform, blocking rivals like Onlyfans, Patreon, Netflix, Amazon, etc” and things like “Being able to charge more for ads” and “being able to clone your business customers’ products and then switch your users to the in-house version.”

Platforms control most of the surplus-allocating options. They can tune your feed so that it mostly consists of media and text from people you explicitly chose to follow, or so that it consists of ads, sponsored posts, or posts they think will “boost engagement” by sinking you into a dismal clickhole. They can made ads skippable or unskippable. They can block posts with links to rival sites to force their business customers to transact within their platform, so they can skim fat commissions every time money changes hands and so that they can glean market intelligence about which of their business customers’ products they should clone and displace.

But platforms can’t just allocate surpluses will-ye or nill-ye. No one would join a brand-new platform whose sales-pitch was, “No matter who you follow, we’ll show you other stuff; there will be lots of ads that you can’t skip; we will spy on you a lot.” Likewise, no one would sign up to advertise or sell services on a platform whose pitch was “Our ads are really expensive. Any business you transact has to go through us, and we’ll take all your profits in junk fees. This also lets us clone you and put you out of business.”

Instead, platforms have to carefully shift their surpluses around: first they have to lure in users, who will attract business customers, who will generate the fat cash surpluses that can be creamed off for the platforms’ investors. All of this has to be orchestrated to lock in each group, so that they won’t go elsewhere when the service is enshittified as it processes through its life-cycle.

This is where network effects and switching costs come into play. A service has “network effects” if it gets more valuable as users join it. You joined Twitter to talk to the people who were already using it, and then other people joined so they could talk to you.

“Switching costs” are what you have to give up when you leave a service: if a service is siloed — if it blocks interoperability with rivals — then quitting that service means giving up access to the people whom you left behind. This is the single most important difference between ActivityPub-based Fediverse services like Mastodon and the silos like Twitter and Facebook — you can quit a Fediverse server and set up somewhere else, and still maintain your follows and followers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/23/semipermeable-membranes/#free-as-in-puppies

In the absence of interoperability, network effects impose their own switching cost: the “collective action problem” of deciding when to leave and where to go. If you depend on the people you follow and who follow you — for emotional support, for your livelihood, for community — then the extreme difficulty of convincing everyone to leave at the same time and go somewhere else means that you can be enticed into staying on a service that you no longer enjoy. The platforms can shift the surpluses away from you, provided that doing so makes you less miserable than abandoning your friends or fans or customers would. This is the Fiddler On the Roof problem: everyone stays put in the shtetl even though the cossacks ride through on the reg and beat the shit out of them, because they can’t all agree on where to go if they leave:

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms-9fc550fe5abf

So the first stage of the platform lifecycle is luring in users by allocating lots of surplus to them — making the service fun and great and satisfying to use. Few or no ads, little or no overt data-collection, feeds that emphasize the people you want to hear from, not the people willing to pay to reach you.

This continues until the service attains a critical mass: once it becomes impossible to, say, enroll your kid in a little-league baseball team without having a Facebook account, then Facebook can start shifting its surpluses to advertisers and other business-users of the platform, who will pay Facebook to interpose themselves in your use of the platform. You’ll hate it, but you won’t leave. Junior loves little-league.

Facebook can enshittify its user experience because the users are now locked in, holding each other hostage. If Facebook can use the courts and technological countermeasures to block interoperable services, it can increase its users’ switching costs, producing more opportunities for lucrative enshittification without the risk of losing the users that make Facebook valuable to advertisers. That’s why Facebook pioneered so many legal tactics for criminalizing interoperability:

https://www.eff.org/cases/facebook-v-power-ventures

This is the second phase of the toxic platform life-cycle: luring in business customers by shifting surpluses from users to advertisers, sellers, etc. This is the moment when the platforms offer cheap and easy monetization, low transaction fees, few barriers to off-platform monetization, etc. This is when, for example, a news organization can tease an article on its website with an off-platform link, luring users to click through and see the ads it controls.

Because Facebook has locked in its users through mutual hostage-taking, it can pollute their feeds with lots of these posts to news organizations’ sites, bumping down the messages from its users’ friends, and that means that Facebook can selectively tune how much traffic it gives to different kinds of business customers. If Facebook wants to lure in sports sites, it can cram those sites’ posts into millions of users’ feeds and send floods of traffic to sports outlets.

Outlets that don’t participate in Facebook lose out, and so they join Facebook, start shoveling their content into it, hiring SEO Kremlinologists to help them figure out how to please The Algorithm, in hopes of gaining a permanent, durable source of readers (and thus revenue) for their site.

But ironically, once a critical mass of sports sites are on Facebook, Facebook no longer needs to prioritize sports sites in its users’ feeds. Now that the sports sites all believe that a Facebook presence is a competitive necessity, they will hold each other hostage there, egging each other on to put more things on Facebook, even as the traffic dwindles.

Once sports sites have taken each other hostage, Facebook can claw back the surplus it allocated to them and use it to rope in another sector — health sites, casual games, employment seekers, financial advisors, etc etc. Each group is ensnared by a similar dynamic to the one that locks in the users.

But there is a difference between users’ surpluses and business’s surpluses. A user’s surplus is attention, and there is no such thing as an “attention economy.” You can’t use attention to pay for data-centers, or executive bonuses, or to lobby Congress. Attention is not a currency in the same way that cryptos are not currency — it is not a store of value, nor a unit of exchange, nor or a unit of account.

Turning attention into money requires the same tactics as turning crypto into money — you have to lure in people who have real, actual money and convince them to swap it for attention. With crypto, this involved paying Larry David, Matt Damon, Spike Lee and LeBron James to lie about crypto’s future in order to rope in suckers who would swap their perfectly cromulent “fiat” money for unspendable crypto tokens.

With platforms, you need to bring in business customers who get paid in actual cash and convince them to give you that cash in exchange for ethereal, fast-evaporating, inconstant, unmeasurable “attention.” This works like any Ponzi scheme (that is, it works like cryptos): you can use your shareholders’ cash to pay short-term returns to business customers, losing a little money as a convincer that brings in more trade.

That’s what Facebook did when it sent enormous amounts of traffic to a select few news-sites that fell for the pivot to video fraud, in order to convince their competitors to borrow billions of dollars to finance Facebook’s bid to compete with Youtube:

https://doctorow.medium.com/metaverse-means-pivot-to-video-adbe09319038

This convincer strategy is found in every con. If you go to the county fair, you’ll see some poor bastard walking around all day with a giant teddy bear that he “won” by throwing three balls into a peach-basket. The carny who operated that midway game let him win the teddy precisely so that he would walk around all day, advertising the game, which is rigged so that no one else wins the giant teddy-bear:

https://boingboing.net/2006/08/27/rigged-carny-game.html

Social media platforms can allocate giant teddy-bears to business-customers, and it can also withdraw them at will. Careful allocations mean that the platform can rope in a critical mass of business customers and then begin the final phase of its life-cycle: allocating surpluses to its shareholders.

We know what this looks like.

Rigged ad-markets:

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

Understaffed content moderation departments:

https://www.dw.com/en/twitters-sacking-of-content-moderators-will-backfire-experts-warn/a-63778330

Knock-off products:

https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/08/twitter-is-the-latest-platform-to-test-a-tiktok-copycat-feature/

Nuking “trust and safety”:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-dissolves-trust-safety-council-2022-12-13/

Hiding posts that have links to rival services:

https://www.makeuseof.com/content-types-facebook-hides-why/

Or blocking posts that link to rival services:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/19/better-failure/#let-my-tweeters-go

Or worse, terminating accounts for linking to rival services:

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2022/12/twitter-suspends-mastodon-account-prevents-sharing-links/

That is, once a platform has its users locked in, and has its business customers locked in, it can enshittify its service to the point of near uselessness without losing either, allocating all the useful surplus in the business to its shareholders.

But this strategy has a problem: users and business customers don’t like to be locked in! They will constantly try to find ways to de-enshittify your service and/or leave for greener pastures. And being at war with your users and business customers means that your reputation continuously declines, because every time a user or business customer figures out a way to claw back some surplus, you have to visibly, obviously enshittify your service wrestle it back.

Every time a service makes headlines for blocking an ad-blocker, or increasing its transaction fees, or screwing over its users or business customers in some other way, it makes the case that the price you pay for using the service is not worth the value it delivers.

In other words, the platforms try to establish an equilibrium where they only leave business customers and users with the absolute bare minimum needed to keep them on the service, and extract the rest for their shareholders. But this is a very brittle equilibrium, because the prices that platforms impose on their users and business customers can change very quickly, even if the platforms don’t do anything differently.

Users and business customers can revalue the privacy costs, or the risks of staying on the platform based on exogenous factors. Privacy scandals and other ruptures can make the cost you’ve been paying for years seem higher than you realized and no longer worth it.

This problem isn’t unique to social media platforms, either. It’s endemic to end-stage capitalism, where companies can go on for years paying their workers just barely enough to survive (or even less, expecting them to get public assistance and/or a side-hustle), and those workers can tolerate it, and tolerate it, and tolerate it — until one day, they stop.

The Great Resignation, Quiet Quitting, the mass desertions from the gig economy — they all prove the Stein’s Law: “Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop.”

Same for long, brittle supply-chains, where all the surplus has been squeezed out: concentrating all the microchip production in China and Taiwan, all the medical saline in Puerto Rico, all the shipping into three cartels… This strategy works well, and can be perfectly tuned with mathematical models that cut right to the joint, and they work and they work.

Until they stop. Until covid. Or war. Or wildfires. Or floods. Or interest rate hikes. Or revolution. All this stuff works great until you wake up and discover that the delicate balance between paying for guard labor and paying for a fair society has tilted, and now there’s a mob building a guillotine outside the gates of your luxury compound.

This is the force underpinning collapse: “slow at first, then all at once.” A steady erosion of the failsafes, flensing all the slack out of the system, extracting all the surpluses until there’s nothing left in the reservoir, no reason to stay.

It’s what caused the near-collapse of Barnes and Noble, and while there are plenty of ways to describe James Daunt’s successful turnaround, the most general characterization is, “He has reallocated the company’s surpluses to workers, readers, writers and publishers”:

https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/what-can-we-learn-from-barnes-and

A system can never truly stabilize. This is why utopias are nonsense: even if you design the most perfect society in which everything works brilliantly, it will still have to cope with war and meteors and pandemics and other factors beyond your control. A system can’t just work well, it has to fail well.

This is why I object so strenuously to people who characterize my 2017 novel Walkaway as a “dystopian novel.” Yes, the protagonists are eking out survival amidst a climate emergency and a failing state, but they aren’t giving up, they’re building something new:

https://locusmag.com/2017/06/bruce-sterling-reviews-cory-doctorow/

“Dystopia” isn’t when things go wrong. Assuming nothing will go wrong doesn’t make you an optimist, it makes you an asshole. A dangerous asshole. Assuming nothing will go wrong is why they didn’t put enough lifeboats on the Titanic. Dystopia isn’t where things go wrong. Dystopia is when things go wrong, and nothing can be done about it.

Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop. The social media barons who reeled users and business customers into a mutual hostage-taking were confident that their self-licking ice-cream cone — in which we all continued to energetically produce surpluses for them to harvest, because we couldn’t afford to leave — would last forever.

They were wrong. The important thing about the Fediverse isn’t that it’s noncommercial or decentralized — it’s that its design impedes surplus harvesting. The Fediverse is designed to keep switching costs as low as possible, by enshrining the Right Of Exit into the technical architecture of the system. The ability to leave a service without paying a price is the best defense we have against the scourge of enshittification.

(Thanks to Tim Harford for inspiring this column via an offhand remark in his kitchen a couple months ago!)

[Image ID: The Phillip Medhurst Picture Torah 397. The Israelites collect manna. Exodus cap 16 v 14. Luyken and son.]

#pluralistic #social media #post-twitter #post-facebook #switching costs #network effects #web theory #locus magazine #exodus #decentralization

3K notes · View notes

astralnymphh · 1 month

Text

๋࣭ ⭑⚝ thinking about the first night at ellie's place ever since you two began dating. girl will bust her ass off preparing to host you there— in the entertainment department of things. fluff!!

. MASTERLIST . DAILY CLICK . IMPORTANT TLOU POST . PALESTINE INFO . BIG TEXT VERSION

she heaps up a myriad of her favorite pastimes in a kaleidoscopic pile on her bed, assuming the waken hours preluding the "main event" (sleeping) will integrate every little thing pre-planned. legit jots a loose schedule of everything she wants to do in a sequestered corner of her journal, and it's surrounded by detailed doodles (that we dare not discuss how long she spent perfecting them) of shooting stars and other cartoony likenesses of paraphernalia or things that you're interested in/remind her of you. spends a fat wad of the initial hours urging you into every activity based on, quote for quote: "ellie's epic design for her first night-over with her girlfriend in hopes that she doesn't mess things up" proof is in the notebook, trust. word for word. anyways, ellie legit believes she can usher you into each thing planned, like, come rain or come shine— everything will be mentioned. bit erratically if anything, poor girl has her nerves amped up since it's her first time having you over, the unfolding of opportunities is unpredictable. shit like, "hey babe i got us a two-player video game." and then it gradually gets more jumpy, "oh, oh yeah, i wanted to sketch you, wait— c'mere, sit on the bed." and thereon it transforms out of the blue, "ughhhh i'm so tired." and she flops back onto the bed exaggeratedly like starfish position, eaglespread limbs and everything. then you clamber on afterwards and pronto you have to confront her, softly for her enervated brain to pick up, "el, did you have some bucket list of things to do in one night?" and her head creaks over like snail-speed, cartoonesque metal grating noise, and her expression is all bug-eyed and flatlined at the lip, sighing kinda guilty but in a silly way, "yeah, uh. shit, was that obvious?" god she's so CUTE. and then it ends up in a really romantic cuddle session where you two just let the conversation take its natural course without any locus of "this is what we're going to do" rather it becomes, "let's listen to what our bodies want to do" and i think that's just very sentimental!!! listening to her instincts to carress and hold you!!! "y'know, like, the first time i kissed you— i kinda wanted to do something like this right after. lay in the grass n' like.. hug eachother.. and stare up." maybe i'll expand on the nature of the cuddle session if people want it. ౨ৎ

love this girl (my photos)

#ellie williams #⤹𓍢ִ໋aestras thoughts #ellie williams x reader #ellie williams fluff #ellie tlou #lesbian #sapphic #ellie x reader #ellie williams x fem!reader #ellie williams fic #ellie williams blurb #ellie williams headcanons #ellie williams concept

378 notes · View notes

locusfandomtime · 8 months

Text

thoughts?

#sorry to my fandom followers for the insane maths posts lately. I’m studying further maths and looking at quartic graphs does things to me #anyway #was going to make a numerator/denominator and top/bottom joke but felt weird doing that #mathblr #shitpost #locus other time #math memes #memes #shipping #favourite number shipping dynamic is when they are poly and are a pythagorean triple. can’t beat that #also YES i know xy would be the same as x * y but there’s no other way to write it for the example #ship names

76 notes · View notes

locustime · 9 months

Text

Spider-people from ATSV as spiders! (Yes, I know Lyla isn’t technically a spider person, and vinegaroons aren’t spiders but you know what I mean!)

what if… instead of spider man… it was spider.

design notes and species info under the cut!

For all of the spiders, I tried to stick vaguely with the IRL colouration (albeit with more fitting patterns). Most colours are colour picked from spider photos. Miles and Miguel have human patterns instead of their spider ones, cute touch I reused from my spidersona

Miles - giant vinegaroon. This is an arachnid BUT not a spider, which I thought matched his whole “not feeling like a real spider person” arc well. I chose this species specifically because it would be a perfect fit for the prowler (spikes, scary look), so fits prowler!miles and the theory miles was going to be the prowler in his universe

Gwen - white porch spider. I really struggled picking her species lol. I knew I wanted something sleek with long legs, but specifics I didn’t really know. I ended up choosing this species because the pale colouration worked nice for Gwen’s colourscheme

Lyla - house jumping spider. I knew as soon as I got the idea I HAD to draw Lyla as a jumping spider, it fits her so well! This one I was more relax with the colours and design as she’s a hologram, I gave her an outline and lighter lineart colours to show this

Miguel - Sydney funnel web spider. Chosen because it’s the most venomous (to humans) spider in the world (and his whole thing is biting) and also because they are just so intimidating and epic. Tbh I don’t think I even did the species justice, I recommend looking them up

#I was gonna do WAY more but I did Miguel and was like #wow this single drawing took 5x longer than I thought it would #I may be a perfectionist when it comes to drawing bugs but at least it’s fun lol #The others were gonna be: Peter B wolf spider (carries daughter)#Hobie tarantula (no tarantulas in the uk I think but they’re cool and hes cool. He’s easy to imagine as one of those mega colourful ones)#pavitr as some spider native to India. A colourful one #that’s as far as I got brainstorming. Feel free to add your own #locus art time #atsv #spiderman atsv #digital art #artists on tumblr #bug #tarantula #< not actually but similar so tagging in case #spider #across the spider verse #spider art #arachnids #vinegaroon #jumping spider #miguel o'hara #art #lyla spiderverse #miles morales #gwen stacy #spider gwen #atsv gwen #spiderverse fanart #atsv miguel

19 notes · View notes

books · 2 years

Text

Writer Spotlight: Tamsyn Muir

Tamsyn Muir probably doesn’t need a lot of introduction here on Tumblr, but for those who aren’t yet familiar with her work: Tamsyn Muir is the bestselling author of the Locked Tomb Series. Her fiction has won the Locus and Crawford awards. It has been nominated for the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Dragon Award, and the Eugie Foster Memorial Award. A Kiwi, she has spent most of her life in Howick, New Zealand, with time living in Waiuku and central Wellington. She currently lives and works in Oxford, in the United Kingdom.

We asked Tamsyn some questions about Nona the Ninth, the next installment of the Locked Tomb series, which comes out on September 13. (Mild spoilers ahead. You have been warned!)

Can you tell us about Nona the Ninth? How would you contextualize it alongside the previous Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth?

The Locked Tomb has always followed a concrete set of rules about whose point of view we’re in—there’s a priority list and a hard if-and-else-if set of codes about who is telling the tale. The priority character is always Gideon Nav herself, but after Gideon the Ninth, in many ways, she gets knocked out of the ring.

Nona is the next rule on the priority list—the next storyteller. Except there are also a bunch of other storytellers popping up in the priority list as she lets her guard down. That’s kind of one curtain I wanted to pull back on The Locked Tomb as a whole. Who’s telling this story? What is the truth as someone else understands it? Which is why, where the last two books have been told very much from the perspectives of the Nine Houses, we’re finally in a setting where the Houses have pulled back, and the truth told is completely different.

You have a knack for approaching the next part of the story from a completely different vantage point, which is deliciously frustrating for the reader. Why do you think this works so well (when really, it sort of shouldn’t)?

Oh, but it does, and it’s been proved to work—just play an RPG! One thing I passionately loved in Final Fantasy IX, my very favourite Final Fantasy at the end of the day, is that one moment you’re with the thief-turned-thespian Zidane and a wonderfully dashing attempt to kidnap a princess in the middle of a theater performance—then you’re with…some very bizarre kid called Vivi…who has lost his ticket and is getting negged by a horrifying rat child. You’re given a completely different lens on a completely different situation in what’s basically a completely different genre. In the same game! There’s a risk of getting too comfortable in someone’s truth—you might want to settle down in a character whom you have learned to understand. But then you have to practice a very radical empathy in settling down in Nona, who just absolutely does not give a shit about swords or empire and, at her worst, can be quite an irritating, materialistic babe in the woods who is WAY too into dogs. Of course it’s alienating. If the experience of being in Gideon’s head was the same as being in Harrow’s as being in Nona’s, there wouldn’t be any point. If different vantage points didn’t work, A Song of Ice and Fire would never have gotten off the ground. Hell, neither would The Iliad. I just sit longer with my vantage point.

After writing foul-mouthed and horny Gideon and acerbic, memory-challenged, and also horny Harrow, how did you approach writing Nona’s character, and what did you enjoy most about the process?

Harrow would hate that you described her as horny. Gideon would be fine with being described as horny. Nona would love to sit you down and talk about all the things that make her horny, at the end of which you are 50% worried that she doesn’t honestly understand ‘horny,’ and 50% worried that she DOES understand ‘horny.’

Nona is my character who doesn’t give a fuck. Gideon and Harrow both give too many. It was fun to write a character who sincerely seeks out love as she understands it, who has a large collection of friends and interests, and has no ambition. And yet what I really enjoyed is that Nona is easily also the most terrifying POV character of the series.

We meet some old friends in a new place in Nona. What aspect of the familiar characters meeting the unfamiliar world was the most fun to write?

Honestly, the fact that they’re in such a different milieu was fun enough. One is a woman completely out of time, trying to find something to live for; two are dyed-in-the-wool Housers forced to re-examine values they’ve always taken for granted and what the next part of life after death is going to look like for them. All three are fish out of water. And then there’s actually the reader meeting the familiar after two long books about the unfamiliar, and all the ways I hope that’s entirely weird and recontextualizing. And then, for Nona, what’s familiar to us is entirely unfamiliar to her. Writing Nona was like one long experiment with jamais vu.

When Lyctorhood goes south or gets experimented with, we get someone’s mind in someone else’s body. What is it that drew you to writing this Cartesian mechanism into the universe of the Nine Houses?

Oh my God, please do not spring words like Cartesian on me, I have not had lunch yet.

My understanding is that Descartes thought mind and matter were two completely different things and then got stuck trying to explain why they don’t feel like two completely different things. So if someone kicks you in the goolies and your mind forms the thought ‘yowch, my goolies,’ how is that mind-matter gulf being bridged? Minds in The Locked Tomb lose to matter nine times out of ten. (This is linked, not coincidentally, to my experience of psychosis.) Gideon’s mind is constantly in danger of being sucked away into the storm drain of Harrow’s matter. Revenants are minds that have temporarily anchored themselves to foreign matter, but over time the matter exerts itself, and the mind starts to fall apart. So when you get a mind that’s big enough not only to resist the matter it’s attached to but actually to start burning that matter up…well, what kind of mind could possibly be so powerful?? (Significant looks at camera.)

You’ve previously headcanoned the often affectionately named “Jod” as Taika Waititi (which offers up the potential for some delightful space-god-gay-pirate crossover fic, thank you). Do you have any casting headcanons for the other characters?

I have recently admitted to loving Erana James as Harrow, except I don’t think Harrowhark is quite that good-looking.

By the way, I wish I had come up with Jod. Whoever did, well done you.

We know you’re not allowed to read fanfic for legal reasons, but who would you find intriguing as a ship proposition and why?

I find all ships intriguing. I’ve spent too long in these mines. No ship is too problematic or cracky for me. My only hope is to out-fandom fandom by presenting them with ships more problematic and crack-filled than they do (I will not; fandom always wins). In these tiresome days where ship wars have been taking on airs, as is my understanding, of virtue versus sin (I don’t even know what Bakudeku is and yet I feel sorry for anyone who ships it; I didn’t ship Reylo because it wasn’t messed-up enough and feel the same), I hope the Locked Tomb fandom is just accepting that all shipping is batshit and every ship is just as bad as the next. Gideon x Harrow is just as bad as Teacher x Crux is as bad as Hot Sauce x Cytherea the First is as bad as Camilla x Juno Zeta is as bad as Silas x Every Asht Brother (actually, I wrote the Asht brothers in an unrelated piece that’ll never see the light of day and imo they’ve suffered enough, but).

I was in the Kingdom Hearts fandom briefly. We shipped people with Goofy. Actually, let’s go with that. Naberius Tern x Goofy. On second thought, please don’t go with that. Goofy had a happy marriage and would know better.

This question has sparked some debate among the editorial team here because we absolutely can’t agree on one. Do you have a favorite character?

Yes. As of twenty seconds ago, it’s Naberius because I can’t enthuse enough over how he and Goofy’s relationship would break down because Babs spends so much money on silk pillowcases to avoid hair frizz. He only needs two, max, but has twenty. I hope Goofy goes on longer and longer adventures with Sora and Donald to try to ignore how his love life is breaking down over Naberius leaving the wedding they were just attending because he saw some other dude wearing the same shirt. Leave him, Goofy!!!

If Nona had a Tumblr, what would it be called, and what would she post?

It would just be a single text post with ‘hi,’ and she didn’t even write it. She dictated to Camilla, then ran out of ideas. Her profile just says ‘nona,’ and it’s a default layout. Nona just wouldn’t see the point of Tumblr, even if you told her there were pictures of dogs: why would you want to see a picture of a dog when you could be near a dog in real life? (I told you Nona was scary.)

Which house would you belong to, and do you see yourself more as an adept or cavalier?

I belong to No House. I’ve never been able to belong to a House. I’ve never been able to sort myself into anything really; I’ve tried, and nothing sticks. I can’t be an adept or a cavalier either, I’m just sitting in the corner glumly eating hot dogs. I guess I’m Hot Dog House.

The Locked Tomb fanart is strong here on Tumblr. Do you have a favorite piece you’ve seen recently?

Every piece I have seen recently is my most favorite piece! I was just in Spain for the Celsius convention, and the most intensely wonderful thing was that I came away with fan art that the fans have done. I don’t know what they’re feeding them there in Spain, but pretty much every fan was just nonchalantly like, ‘I drew this,’ and presented me with the goddamn Sistine Chapel. Someone had, while they were waiting in a queue, just filled a sketchbook with the most incredible work on the fly. Special shout-out to a marvelous flipbook I got where Harrow and Gideon are ducks.

The plan was for Alecto the Ninth to be the third and last book. Here we are with Nona the Ninth and Alecto still set to appear (we are not complaining). How has that process been?

AWFUL!!!!

It took me a long time to let go of the fact that it wasn’t going to be a trilogy; it was four books. I want the story to be done now! For one thing, because I’m really excited about the ending, and for another thing, the longer this goes on, the more of a terrible gremlin I become. The Locked Tomb is very special to me, but also I have five million other stories to write and only so long in a lifetime. I’ve been with this world since 2018, and I am wildly excited to get to all the other places. My editor and I will, I think, shed a sentimental tear on the final page, but also, you haven’t even met Teresa Santos yet, who has kept every gun she has ever loved.

What kind of writer are you? A plotter? A pantser? Do you have any morning rituals that set you up for a day of writing?

Plotter. I envy pantsers and gardeners. This is why Nona being unexpected got to me so much. I don’t actually have any rituals or exercises or anything—it’s important for me to have a specific writing space and a good breakfast. But every book is different. Like, what helped with Harrow was breaking every so often to die in Donkey Kong Country.

Do you have any writing or publishing or life advice for any budding queer sci-fi writers reading this?

I see so many writers—and this may also have something to do with being a queer writer—giving themselves SUCH a goddamned hard time. If I could give any advice to them, it would be to stop beating themselves up so much. I’m really dubious at how there’s this perceived glamorous youthquake to writing— like, that if you haven’t been published by 25 and don’t have BookTok at your feet, you’re a failure—it is so much more important to live your life. I’m so grateful I lived in an era where I could write fanfiction, for instance, and not have the sense that it ought to be my side hustle. You don’t have to have published the world’s most important and meaningful queer SFF story by the time you are 29. You don’t need to have done jack shit.

I do have one piece of practical life advice because if I have any regrets, it is that for a large portion of my early twenties, I used to consume like six cans of Mountain Dew a day. I don’t think this sparked queer joy. I think it stripped away all my tooth enamel. You will LOVE having tooth enamel in your old age, so stop.

The Locked Tomb is seriously good and gloriously queer, and its continued success will hopefully encourage more publishers to publish more queer sci-fi, all of the time. Do you have any queer sci-fi reading recs to tide us over while we await Alecto?

Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh is coming soon. It should really be called Problematic Gays I Have Loved (this is why they don’t let me title things).

Thank you so much to Tamsyn for taking the time to answer our questions! We’re so excited to see everyone’s reactions to Nona the Ninth when she arrives on September 13!! In the meantime, head over to the #the locked tomb tag for fan theories, fics, and art (remember to filter for spoilers)!

#writer spotlight #tamsyn muir #nona the ninth #harrow the ninth #gideon the ninth #you can't spell necromantic without romantic #the locked tomb #writers on tumblr #tlt #lgbtqia+ lit #lgbtqia+ reading recs

6K notes · View notes