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fabled-fiction · 11 months

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Maybe a Hobie Brown x Mabel-Pines-Type!Reader? Older obviously, with just like, her personality and fashion sense? A Chaotic Sunshine meets Chaotic Rebel type thing.

If not interested, just ignore. But I look forward to whatever you write!

Starstruck (Hobie Brown x Fem!Sunshine!Reader)

Summary: You’re Jess Drew’s gal in the chair (in training), and when you have to make a quick trip the spider society you happen to catch a certain punk’s eye.

Word Count: 2.3k

Warnings: MINOR SPIDERMAN ACROSS THE SPIDERVERSE SPOILERS, use of (Y/N)

A/N: I hope this meets your expectations!! I had alot of fun writing this!

EARTH-1618

KINGS, NEW YORK CITY

Your desk was more glitter than wood at this point.

It was hard to tell where the stickers stopped and where the wood of your desk started.

Especially now, as you squeezed glue on top of whatever artpiece you were currently working on. An array of different paint tubes and what looked like glitter bombs were spread about your work area, dangerously close to what looked like very expensive monitors and pcs. Though it was kind of hard to tell based on all the string worms and star stickers pasted on any surface that wasn’t a screen.

The project, which could only be identified as an oversized button pin upon closer inspection, was coming together nicely. Atleast in your eyes.

It read “BEST SPIDER” with a cute doddle of a spider surrounded by loads of blue, yellow, and red glitter. Currently you were putting your finishing touches on it by attaching color coordinated ribbons to the bottom ruffles.

The craftsmanship alone of it was indeed impressive, you just needed to look past the blinding reflectiveness of it.

It was for your mentor, Spiderwoman.

Who had taken you under her wing for the past two years, “training” you to be the best. Well, best in the sense of “gal in the chair”. At first it didn't make a whole lot of sense to you, but neither did the world you were thrown into. She apparently saw something in you from all the way across the multiverse.

The rest was history.

“(Y-)..(Y/N)...(Y/N)!”

The glue bottle currently in your hands spun in the air, a chaotically beautiful cascade of glue spewing in the air and (thankfully) somehow none of it landed on you. Slowly turning your head, you gave a small wave as you saw said mentor on the screen staring down at you.

“Jess! Hey…did you..did you try calling my watch?”

“What do you think?”

Spinning your chair across the room, you snatched your multiversal watch and flicked the screen on.

You did in fact have about five missed calls from her. You could feel her iced stare from across the room, hell from across dimensions.

“But it was getting in the way of my creative liberties!”

“I don’t care! As the second half of a spider person you need to be available 24/7! Your future spider will need to be able to rely on you.”

Slipping the watch onto your wrist, you shot yourself back over to your desk and smiled widely at her. She knew that whatever scolding she gave you would only have about a few moments effect. Sure the message would stick but she always had that nagging feeling in the back of her mind of how long it truly stuck.

“Well, You have me on the horn now! What's up? Who do I need to aid with my technological wonders? My sleuthing skills? I'm ready to Sherlock it up!”

After a few more long blank faced seconds, Jess reached up to pinch the bridge of her nose.

“We actually need you here. Our resident Spider who usually deals with all of our technological deals is having some connectivity issues.”

Your heart stopped for a moment, but only for a moment before you were shooting out of your seat and whooping. Jumping around your room, you threw your fist in the air before a sudden realization dawned upon you mid air.

It was almost comical how you seemed to pause mid jump.

“Oh my god…I have to change. I can't show up to Spider Society looking like this!”

“(Y/N) there's no time! Grab your bag and get here now.”

Standing in shock, you huffed as you watched your computer screen clip off.

She was crazy if she thought you weren’t at least gonna put on some body glitter.

“Jess said to meet her here…do you think she got lost?”

Hobie shrugged, shoving his hands into his vest pockets. His fingers found themselves fiddling with whatever computer chip or part he had nabbed as he leaned against what could be considered a front desk.

“You know ‘er best. She usually punctual?”

Gwen looked up from her watch with an exasperated look. That told Hobie all he needed to know as he leaned his head back with a sigh.

“Listen! I've never met her in person! She’s one of Jess’s other trainees! I just know she's not a spider, and that despite having worked with Jess for two plus years she's never stepped foot in Spider Society!”

“She’s a chair?”

Pinching her nose, Gwen nodded. “Yea. A pretty good one too. She is a bit…eccentric though. And loud…I think she blew my eardrum out one time. I had tinnitus for like a week...”

“So she’s got some vocals on ‘er aye?”

“Thats all you picked up on? C’mon Hobie help me look for anyone who looks lost we’re supposed to chaperon h-”

Usually the portals that opened here were the usual semi-chaotic reality altering ones. But for some reason the one that just opened in front of them was nothing of the sort. No..this one opened with a loud tear; Everything and everyone in the vicinity was enveloped in a neon pink hue.

It was hard to tell who came stumbling out of the portal, as Hobie feared that if he moved his hand he would temporarily blind himself. But as the portal closed, and everything returned to its normal color palette, he finally dared to move his hand.

Maybe he shouldn’t have moved his hand.

Cause he was only met with a very different, blinding sight.

You had just fully stood from what he could only assume was a clumsy entrance. You wore what could only be described as almost every color of the rainbow but someone you pulled it off. There was absolutely no way you could move silently, as you were adorned in a plethora of kandi bracelets, pastel chains and pins. Your hair was adorned in a multitude of clips that matched the ones on your bag.

Was your smile an accessory too? Hobie was sure it was, cause it was blinding him just as much as the body glitter that was spread over your legs and arms were.

His hand slowly reached up to clutch the chest of his jacket, in hopes that it would remind his heart to beat.

It wasn’t until Gwen had elbowed him in the side (hard enough to bruise might he add) that he remembered to breathe.

“Don’t stare, it's rude.”

He didn’t want to look away.

“Hi! Im Gwen…Stacy! We’ve talked a few times over coms?”

You smiled even wider as you grabbed Gwen’s hand and shook it rather violently (or enthusiastically it could have been confused for either). When she removed her hands from your drip it was left brighter than before for only a moment.

“Hi! Its nice to finally put a non-masked face to the name! Im (Y/N). And you are?”

Your sneakers squeaked as you took a sharp turn to face Hobie fully.

“Im Hobie Brown. Quiet the entrance you made.”

He holds his hand out, and is relieved when you shake it for just as long as you did Gwen’s. He watches as it glowed then returned to its normal saturation.

“Yeaaaa. Apparently my Earth is like WAY brighter than most. I would’ve brought sunglasses if I had known that would happen. Anyways…can you show me to the computer lab..hub…wherever this Spider-Byte normally operates?”

Gwen had taken it upon herself to lead the charge, and include a quick run over tour of whatever facility you all happened to pass on the way to the lab.

Everything was so bright, but what amazed you more were the amount of Spider people that were just casually walking about. Either they were coming back from patrol, returning from break or coming for the first time.

You were sure your neck was gonna hurt or have a permanent crook in it from how much you were whipping your head around and turning to take everything in. You weren’t sure when the next time you would be here would be, so you wanted to take it all in.

“And here is where all the computer magic happens! You uh…know what you’ve gotta do from here right?” Gwen awkwardly raised her hands as if to present the lab.

“Yup! Im TECHNICALLY supposed to monitor your guys software and stuff and blah blah blah but I actually connected with Layla on the way here-who is super sweet by the way-and Im actually just gonna fix Spider-Byte’s connectivity issues here so she can get back to it. Y’know since she’s more knowledgeable with everything here. I would probably just mess something up.”

Despite the fact that you spoke about a mile a minute, and it was obvious Gwen was struggling to keep up, Hobie hung onto every word.

You moved like you had been here before despite this being your first time even stepping foot on the premises. You just moved with this sense of self confidence that had the aura of the room commanded by your presence alone. If you hadn’t told them your Earth just naturally saturated Hobie would have just assumed your essence was just too potent that it leaked off you and onto whatever you touched.

You were leagues above him when it came to the coolness factor.

Watching as you moved around the consoles via spinny chair (when did that get there?), each screen popped up and immediately began to run code. Hobie liked to pride himself on being a tech wiz, but this was levels beyond what he knew how to do. Maybe he could learn a thing or two from you.

But as he watched your hands, he noticed…were you TAKING code off the computers too?

Oh, that just brought a smile to his face.

As Gwen wandered over to the other side of the console to watch the miles of code run across the screen, Hobie took the opportunity to have a moment with you on the opposite side of the room.

Right when you went to shoot across him (and might he add it was almost like you had spider like reflexes with how you moved around on this thing), his hand went to grab the back of your chair.

Pulling the chair back, he watched as you rubber banded back into the seat and stood straight up. He leaned over your shoulder to look at the screen in front of you both. His hand reached over to tap a few keys and pull up the results onto just this screen.

Ignoring how his spider senses were shooting down his spine at an all time high with how close he was to you, he looked at you with a smirk.

“Did you just ‘alf inch some of our code?”

“Im sorry?”

Leaning in closer, he pulled the thumb drive out of only this terminal and held it up. Your cheeks turned a dark red in realization to being caught, and you crossed your arm as you started at him.

“You know wha’ I said”

Turning quickly, you pulled ANOTHER flash drive out from your pocket and stuck it into the port. The downloading resumed, and much to Hobie’s surprise you stood and snatched the thumb drive from him.

“First of all, I am part of the ‘’our’’ and second of all…it's none of your business.”

Suddenly multiple of the screens, well practically all of the screens in the room flashed green. With a pat of his shoulder, you rolled over to every computer and pulled out each flashdrive. Hobie counted…12!

He covered his mouth, trying to keep his cool disposition as he watched you quickly shove each one in your bag. You little grifter you…he would definitely have to find out what Earth you were from…

With the push of a button, you turned to them with a smile as you placed your hands on your hips.

“Alrighty! My work here is done…wait..,”

Turning around, you pressed the enter key on the computer behind you only to whip right back around smile as all the screens returned to normal.

You had been here all but twenty minutes and you managed to do solve all of their problems and then some.

“Now Im done! Gwen, you have my contact coordinate. Call me if you need me at all.”

Your eyes raked over Hobie, and you couldn’t help but feel a flutter in your chest as he watched you carefully. The hair on your arms stood when he had leaned over you earlier. You could tell from his punk aesthetic and impressive hair that he was definitely anarchy incarnate…

He intrigued you. You were sure the data files you had picked up from the archives would barely answer every question you had about him.

You would have to push off your paper mache project for tonight…

“It was nice meeting you Hobie! Hope we can meet again sometime. Im like, basically free all the time…Later!”

Signing off with a peace sign, your neon portal opened again and closed in an instant as you fell into it.

“See what I mean, eccentric.”

“I thought she was pretty cool.”

Walking over to where you just stood, Hobie ran his fingers over where you had last touched hoping to catch some of the light leftover.

It was then he noticed you had left behind one of your thumb drives. It was definitely yours, a bright neon yellow covered in white glitter that fell off as he picked it up. His other hand came down to pick up the tag on the string connected to it.

‘Oops! Guess I left behind this VERY important thumb drive. Mind returning it to me? I like really need it for super duper important chair stuff…Earth 1618, Kings, New York City things y'know.

– (Y/N)’

#hobie x reader #hobie brown x reader #hobie brown #spiderpunk x reader #spider punk #x reader #across the spiderverse #oneshot #spiderman across the spiderverse #spiderman across the spiderverse x reader #marvel x reader

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rayroseu · 2 months

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Now that I think about it, maybe the reason why Malleus' Magic is so powerful, because before he was born he was copiously sustained with powerful magicians like Meleanor, Maleficia, and Lilia.

The egg is born through love but only through magic can that egg finally hatch (that's where Lilia exhausted his magic). Maybe a fae's power is determined to how much magic can their parents "exhaust" in making them born(?).

So, essentially, His magic consists of the magic of powerful mages.

1) Meleanor (as his biological mother),

2) Maleficia (her magic was life support while he was incubated),

and 3) Lilia (who hatched him).

So when we fight Malleus, we are not just simply fighting "Malleus" himself, but rather a lethal culmination of Meleanor, Maleficia, and Lilia's raw power.

That's why it feels so impossible to defeat him because we're essentially fighting three powerful magicians at once, it's just in the form of "Malleus Draconia."

All these magicians have high-profile powerful magic, and all of them are faes too. I often assumed that Malleus was rich in magic because he's a Draconia but no, Meleanor used her full magical strength as well but the story didn't showcase her casting some world altering magic like stopping time and encasing human souls inside a magical barrier— Only Malleus did...

Maybe there's really no person who can defeat him as STYX theorizes... Not even Maleficia. While its true she's powerful, but based on this interpretation, she can fight Malleus, but fighting Malleus is also the same as fighting her magic, mixed with Meleanor's and Lilia's (and Levan's even though we don't know how powerful he is).

Levan is Malleus' father but so far the story doesn't imply nor mention any significant magical contribution he did to Malleus. The only thing mentioned in the story about Levan's influence was that Malleus is a kind/gentle person because of him.

I like to interpret he's powerful too! So maybe, its not just Meleanor, Maleficia, Lilia, but also Levan.... if he got the chance to bless Eggmalleus some magic before he lost. So its actually FIVE HIGH CLASS MAGICIANS were fighting against if we fight Malleus ☠️☠️ That's why he's truly "god-like".

I really like the fact that Malleus is undefeatable even by raw power or raw cleverness (like using technology). I know that's still going to be a big part, but its more intriguing for me to how TWST will handle stopping Malleus without obvious offense.

They'll only need to rely on one thing that humans are really great of practicing (more than faes): communication. Maybe the solution may be as simple as talking to Malleus that he needs to stop lol Because really, at this point, thats the most staple choice we have, anything else takes too much time💔😔

Not in the accusing way, but in a kind and understanding way. But, I know that's unlikely to happen knowing how "cringed" NRC is towards displaying kindness (which is often their downfall lol). But remember, the resolution at the fairy gala event? Where everyone was antagonizing the Diurnal Fairies, assuming they'll be stubborn and that they're thieves so they should take the stone without asking them, but then it turns out once they got caught and Silver talked with them apologetically and with understandingly, the Queen understood it and let the stone go...

Maybe Malleus would act like that Queen too?? After all, no one still talks with him about how "indeed, it is painful to suffer and lost, but there's merit in their existence, so we don't need to cut them out of our lives, because even those painful experiences helps us achieve our true dreams." or just a simple "You won't be alone even if Lilia passes away. I'm sure Lilia will be more happy to live his life and live it longer because he'll be remembered by Malleus even if he's just a memory now." or maybe a blunt "The world doesn't revolve around anyone, so Malleus has no rights to dictate how we should live our lives" lol

I feel like Malleus is just a person who never really thinks about other interpretations unless its been said to him... That's why I'm wishing that Book 7 resolves his overblot by not fully painting him as a "catastrophic dark fae" (like what the humans viewed Meleanor), like there'll be a balance between depicting him as a villain but also as a flawed person.

But yes I do agree that the biggest hurdle in defeating Malleus, may not just be his overpowered magic, but also his defiance in believing that he can understand humanity and humanity will understand him 😭😭

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apas-95 · 3 months

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I think a lot of the basis for anarchism's common 'How would we deal with that? Well, it simply wouldn't happen,' problem is the notion of human behaviour 'in a vacuum'.

In reality, we're not building society in a vacuum. We're building it in the real world, out of our real society. We're not imagining some scenario where a bunch of generic people appear in a forest clearing and build a town, we're planning how to improve the society we actually exist in, a society populated by our real neighbours, with all their social dependencies and baggage. Maybe, indeed, a human being in the abstract would have no reason to steal from common stockpiles, or behave antisocially, or refuse to work when able - it is vacuously true. We can't care about supposed innate human nature, all human behaviour is dependent on context and environment. You need to think through the question of 'what happens when someone does anyway?' - because the answer might not be a comfortable one. Refusing to acknowledge the hard questions and their implications doesn't make you better than those that have openly stated what difficult measures and compromises they will navigate. Most of the time, when pressed, the answer to 'what happens' from those who have attempted to ignore the question, is 'death squad', or 'nobody owes you anything'.

Necessarily, whenever we look ahead to a planned future, we also need to look at what it requires to go from here to there. Instead of just appearing, history-free in a settlement, we must make our own way there, fighting against every force that would intend to keep us where we are. We can definitively say this about our future: the organisations and institutions that will build it will have to be ones that have not only survived but also won a revolutionary civil war, against the forces of police and military technology and equipment. That immediately precludes what directions we can organise towards. We have a fixed basis: our present society; and we have now, too, a fixed direction: a fighting organisation that can survive, grow, and organise an entire society around itself. Critically, we also have a wealth of historical experience as to how such things are done - how to fight, how to win. Those are the key things - how do we, tomorrow, today if we're free, start working towards the total military defeat of our enemy, and the preservation of ourselves, in the real world? 'How will we deal with that?' is an incredibly important question to answer now, when we're not yet in a muddy hole shooting fascists and bleeding.

Fundamentally, this is not a thought experiment, this is not a ponderance on the nature of man, it is a matter of practical planning, for when our strikes are dispersed by armed force, and when our breakfast programs are assaulted by fascist thugs. Anything less can only reveal a lack of actual revolutionary aims.

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 months

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Electrons, not molecules

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TUCSON (Mar 9-10), then SAN FRANCISCO (Mar 13), Anaheim, and more!

When hydrocarbon barons do their damndest to torch the Earth with fossil fuels, they call us dreamers. They insist that there's a hard-nosed reality – humanity needs energy – and they're the ones who live in it, while we live in the fairy land where the world can run on sunshine and virtuous thoughts. Without them making the tough decisions, we'd all be starving in the frigid dark.

Here's the thing: they're full of shit.

Mostly.

Humanity does need energy if we're going to avoid starving in the frigid dark, but that energy doesn't have to come from fossil fuels. Indeed, in the long-term, it can't. Even if you're a rootin' tootin, coal-rollin' climate denier, there's a hard-nosed reality you can't deny: if we keep using fossil fuels, they will someday run out. Remember "peak oil" panic? Fossil fuels are finite, and the future of the human race needn't be. We need more.

Thankfully, we have it. Despite what you may have heard, renewables are more than up to the task. Indeed, it's hard to overstate just how much renewable energy is available to us, here at the bottom of our gravity well. I failed to properly appreciate it until I read Deb Chachra's brilliant 2023 book, How Infrastructure Works:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects

Chachra, an engineering prof and materials scientist, offers a mind-altering reframing of the question of energy: we have a material problem, not an energy problem. If we could capture a mere 0.4% of the sun's rays that strike the Earth, we could give every person on the planet the energy budget of a Canadian (like an American, only colder).

Energy isn't just wildly abundant, though: it's also continuously replenished. For most of human history, we've treated energy as scarce, eking out marginal gains in energy efficiency – even as we treated materials as disposable, using them once and consigning them to a midden or a landfill. That's completely backwards. We get a fresh shipment of energy every time the sun (or the moon) comes up over the horizon. By contrast, new consignments of material are almost unheard of – the few odd ounces of meteoric ore that survive entry through Earth's atmosphere.

A soi-dissant adult concerned with the very serious business of ensuring our species isn't doomed to the freezing, starving darkness of an energy-deprived future would think about nothing save for this fact and its implications. They'd be trying to figure out how to humanely and responsibly gather the materials needed for the harvest, storage and distribution of this nearly limitless and absolutely free energy.

In other words, that Very Serious, Hard-Nosed Grown-Up should be concerned with using as few molecules as possible to harvest as many electrons as possible. They'd be working on things like turning disused coal-mines into giant gravity batteries:

https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/02/06/this-disused-mine-in-finland-is-being-turned-into-a-gravity-battery-to-store-renewable-ene

Not figuring out how to dig or flush more long-dead corpses out of the Earth's mantle to feed them into a furnace. That is a profoundly unserious response to the human need for energy. It's caveman shit: "Ugh, me burn black sticky gunk, make cave warm, cough cough cough."

Enter Exxon CEO Darren Woods, whose interview with Fortune's Michal Lev-Ram and editor Alan Murray contains this telling quote: "we basically focus our technology on transforming molecules and they happen to be hydrogen and carbon molecules":

https://fortune.com/2024/02/28/leadership-next-exxonmobil-ceo-darren-woods/

As Bill McKibben writes, this is a tell. A company that's in the molecule business is not in the electron business. For all that Woods postures about being a clear-eyed realist beating back the fantasies of solarpunk-addled greenies, Woods does not want a future where we have all our energy needs met:

https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/the-most-epic-and-literal-gaslighting

That's because the only way to get that future is to shift from molecules – whose supply can be owned and therefore sold by Exxon – to electrons, which that commie bastard sun just hands out for free to every person on our planet's surface, despite the obvious moral hazard of all those free lunches. As Woods told Fortune, when it comes to renewables, "we don’t see the ability to generate above-average returns for our shareholders."

Woods dresses this up in high-minded seriousness kabuki, saying that Exxon is continuing to invest in burning rotting corpses because our feckless species "waited too long to open the aperture on the solution sets terms of what we need as a society." In other words, it's just too late for solar. Keep shoveling those corpses into the furnace, they're all that stands between you and the freezing, starving dark.

Now, this is self-serving nonsense. The problem of renewables isn't that it's too late – it's that they don't "generate above-average returns for our shareholders" (that part, however, is gospel truth).

But let's stipulate that Woods sincerely believes that it is too late. It's pretty goddamned rich of this genocidal, eminently guillotineable monster to just drop that in the conversation without mentioning the role his company played in getting us to this juncture. After all, #ExxonKnew. 40 years ago, Exxon's internal research predicted climate change, connected climate change to its own profits, and predicted how bad it would be today.

Those predictions were spookily accurate and the company took them to heart, leaping into action. For 40 years, the company has been building its offshore drilling platforms higher and higher in anticipation of rising seas and superstorms – and over that same period, Exxon has spent millions lobbying and sowing disinformation to make sure that the rest of us don't take the emergency as seriously as they are, lest we switch from molecules to electrons.

Exxon knew, and Exxon lied. McKibben quotes Woods' predecessor Lee Raymond, speaking in the runup to the Kyoto Treaty negotiations: "It is highly unlikely that the temperature in the middle of the next century will be significantly affected whether policies are enacted now or 20 years from now."

When Woods says we need to keep shoveling corpses into the furnace because we "waited too long to open the aperture on the solution sets terms of what we need as a society," he means that his company lied to us in order to convince us to wait too long.

When Woods – and his fellow enemies of humanity in the C-suites of Chevron and other corpse-torching giants – was sending the arson billions to his shareholders, he held back a healthy share to fund this deceit. He colluded with the likes of Joe Manchin ("[D-POLLUTION]" -McKibben) to fill the Inflation Reduction Act with gifts for molecules. The point of fantasies like "direct air carbon-capture" is to extend the economic life of molecule businesses, by tricking us into thinking that we can keep sending billions to Exxon without suffocating in its waste-product.

These lies aren't up for debate. Back in 2021, Greenpeace tricked Exxon's top DC lobbyist Keith McCoy into thinking that he was on a Zoom call with a corporate recruiter and asked him about his work for Exxon, and McCoy spilled the beans:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/01/basilisk-tamers/#exxonknew

He confessed to everything: funding fake grassroots groups and falsifying the science – he even names the senators who took his bribes. McCoy singled out Manchin for special praise, calling him "a kingmaker" and boasting about the "standing weekly calls" Exxon had with Manchin's office.

Exxon's response to this nine-minute confession was to insist that their most senior American lobbyist "wasn't involved at all in forming policy positions."

McKibben points to the forthcoming book The Price Is Wrong, by Brett Christophers, which explains how the neoclassical economics establishment's beloved "price signals" will continue to lead us into the furnace:

https://www.versobooks.com/products/3069-the-price-is-wrong

The crux of that book is:

We cannot expect markets and the private sector to solve the climate crisis while the profits that are their lifeblood remain unappetizing.

Nearly 100 years ago, Upton Sinclair wrote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Today, we can say that it's impossible to get an oil executive to understand that humanity needs electrons, not molecules, because his shareholders' obscene wealth depends on it.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

#pluralistic #bill mckibben #exxon #exxonknew #solarpunk #climate #climate emergency #climate crisis #gaslighting #guillotine watch #Darren Woods #incentives matter

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idontknowreallyidontcare · 5 months

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KÖNIG HC’S FOR MY KÖNIG GIRLS.

- I HC him as being definitely taller than your average man, but not his fanon height. Many people go with the narrative that he’s 6’10/2m 08cm’s, for what I understood this is a made up data, nowhere is it specified that he’s actually 6’10, so what I actually assign him is a height of 6’7, we know how Ghost is somewhere between 6’4/6’5 which it’s still pretty tall (1,89 cm), but we also know by comparing the models, that König is a bit taller, so I am kind of basing his height on this difference between him and Ghost. Also, knowing he could not be a sniper because of his height motivates me even more to think that he is indeed a guy bigger than your average. Again, it’s a personal HC, may or may not be shared, it’s not a canon attribute.

- As I already specified in some of my other posts, I view him as a clean individual, in a sense than he has a routine and will try to maintain it even on duty. Being at the barracks will not obstruct his routine, he washes his hair with shampoo and conditioner, he uses a particular face soap, made for his type of skin, and he uses body lotion instead of a bar of soap. It has to be said that he wasn’t always this organized, for example, thanks to you he got to buy the face wash that he now brings everywhere he goes, you kinda talked to him about using a bar of soap for all the body and explained to him how unhygienic was to use the same towel for face, body and cock/ass, because despite you being ‘clean’ after the shower, you’re still dragging bacteria form around your body onto your face and hair, overall you kinda motivated him to uplift his already good habits. He sometimes lets you do his skincare too, and when he remembers, he will actually put some face cream on. He’s still a bit fearful of coming as not very masculine, but you’re making him work on it, so he can accept that taking care of himself will never be a turn down for you, not when he’s already so hot for his age, he better maintain himself!

- Another critical point about our Köni is his age. We have a vague idea of how old he could be, many HC’ing him from 35 to late 40’s. My guess is he could be somewhere between 38 and 43, I do prefer him as a 39/40 years grandpa tho. Again, personal HC, do not take it as canon! I’d be happy honestly if they would reveal his age, probably because no matter what, I’d still simp even if he turned out to be 50 years lmaooooo.

- Yes, he does come from a village in the country side, but he did join military pretty young, so I HC him as being actually a pretty open minded individual. Remember he gets to work with technology every day, he knows what’s going on around the world, and him joining young actually was a benefit, because he got to form his own opinions in a place that welcomed every kind of human beings. He didn’t get to grow up from the hate he received at school so he kind of escaped a life where he could’ve easy became what we call an inc€l today. He grew some balls, got his priorities right. He was for sure subjected to some kind of morally wrong opinions that grew into him, that’s why you’re spending time on him, being patient and trying to explain to him many things he considered undeniable reality until he meet you. The classic ones are: males should not cry because only girls do, women can work but they would be better at home, men don’t pay attention to their physical appearance that’s for feminine boys, and many similar things. He’s slowly getting out of his habits, and you’re proud of him.

- Listen, people have mixed feelings about this one but imma say it, aside from shipping and all, König is not and will never be Homophobic. He does not have any problem with lgbt+ nor is he disturbed by couples openly showing affection in his presence. Early access to internet and a very religious family could have created the worst possible outcome for him, but he was never big into religion, already redeeming it a waste of time at a young age, but still attending church because of his mom. He knows some recruits are openly gay, he doesn’t see a problem nor does it bother him knowing he could be someone’s crush. Now I do HC him as completely straight, but again it’s MY way of imagining König, I still think that in an orgy or threesome with reader, if he trusts the other male part, he would not be against having their cocks in the same hole, rubbing against each other, or in general he would not be against having some skin to skin contact with another male because at the end he does it because it only benefits you.

- He is a perverted dog, not only because he is ‘old’ and has fucked young girls (not minors! He is not morally fucked up like that), or generally his sexual history is pretty normal for a man that age, he was just always eager to see, learn and search for what he felt was exciting to him. He had threesomes before us, he has sex, he did many things that gave him the skills and experience he’s been using on us, but yes overall I HC him as being the one that always had a porn journal under his pillow, he would even lend them around the barracks.

- He loves pussy. He eats it for HIS own pleasure okay? He would die between your legs. He cums only by eating you out. He gets drunk on pussy. Pussy is what he lives for. He’ll never die on field, living purely out of spite, because he’ll no! What do you mean he’s never gonna enjoy your pussy again if he dies! ABSOLUTELY NOT! He’ll get home, beaten, cut, stabbed, whatever, but he’ll be home to you, and he will lick your pussy for the rest of the night saying “this what’s keeping me alive honey”. And truth is you can’t deny it to him, because it’s so good, no matter the circumstances, it always brings him back home.

#cod x reader #cod #konig cod #konig smut #konig x reader smut #konig call of duty #konig x reader

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themidnightcrimson · 1 year

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Present—w. maximoff

summary: in which wanda wants to give you your birthday present at your party.

warnings: top!wanda, fingering, cumstrap, slight voyeurism, lots of groping, wanda being horny and feral, tony stark is our father

this post is for 18+ only. minors: do not interact.

masterlist.

Your father was addicted to showcasing. His new iron suits, each time they were thoroughly assembled and polished, were showcased in glass cases throughout the mansion. Each time his AI helpers (more like nannies for adult men) learned a new skill that he precariously programmed into them, he would drag the whole team down just to watch. And when it was his daughter’s birthday, he had a mission to showcase you to everyone he knew.

Your living room was filled with people you had never even met before. Tony had friends from all over the world and in every subculture of science and technology and millionaires. He’d been introducing you to everyone ever since you were a toddler on his hip, but there were just too many to remember.

An array of “Look how much you’ve grown!” even though you’ve been able to legally vote for years and are a fully formed, fully functioning adult, goaded you to leave your father’s side and head towards the bar. It was like you were only known as Tony’s daughter and not as a valid and serious member on the Avenger team.

Your short black dress did nothing to exacerbate people’s childish views of you, and it certainly left nothing to the eye as you rest your elbows on the bar top, leaning over slightly at the waist and waiting for the bartender to finish making a drink for a few people down the row.

With your eyes incrementing across every bottle in the row of liquor displayed behind the bar, you didn’t see or hear someone come up behind you. In fact, before you could catch a head of red hair sneaking behind you in the mirror that walled the bar, you felt a hand embrace one cheek of your ass, an upper body pressing hard against you to keep you still so that the hand could squeeze your flesh bruisingly hard.

Gasping at the flash of heat that embroidered your skin with their touch, your preliminary worries of being faced with one of Tony’s weird old friends faded away simply from your body recognizing who that hand belonged to. You straightened, hearing a feminine voice hum into your ear, and that was when your eyes focused on the woman through the mirror.

“Wanda,” you whispered, shimmying your way out of her grip, though her hand was insistent to stay locked on your ass.

She gave you no room between her body and the bar as you carefully turned around, and in fact, she took a step closer, conclusively trapping you and giving you no space to breathe.

Your friendship with Wanda had spanned a number of years, ever since she joined the team, but the new spark between you was fresh and exhilarating. It was only a few weeks ago that she approached you rather aggressively, and between several makeout sessions and a few rendezvous of fucking, she seemed to be rather obsessed with you. Luckily, she was beautiful and persuasive, keeping you just as hooked as she was.

You gave her a reprimanding yet gentle slap on her shoulder, trying your hardest to ignore her deep red suit and an off-centered wrinkle in her pants. “You can’t just come up and grab my ass in front of everyone—an in front of my dad!”

“He’s clueless,” Wanda whispered, her deep pink lips crawling into a smirk as she nodded towards where Tony was standing across the room, not even having to look at him to check his head. He was, indeed, blabbering to some woman, most likely showcasing some feat of his to her. “And you…” Wanda continued, her thick eyelashes fanning downwards as her gaze followed in that direction. She grabbed your hips and swung you closer to her. “You shouldn’t be wearing that.”

Her green eyes met yours again with a sultry look that plucked whatever remark you had loaded right out of your mouth. Rolling your eyes coyly, you moved away from her hold.

“I’m starting to think you’re just a teenage boy hiding in a grown woman’s body,” you joked, finally getting the bartender’s attention and ordering a drink while Wanda sat down on the barstool near you, ordering herself one too.

“You don’t appreciate the extra attention on your special day?” she asked as you hesitantly sat next to her, originally considering sitting a seat away so that she couldn’t reach you with her grabby hands.

“It’s not a special day,” you huffed as you crossed your legs, pulling the end of your short dress down to cover your thighs, but you caught Wanda already looking.

“Sure it is,” she enthusiastically said as your drinks were set in front of you. “It’s the day the most beautiful girl in the world was born.” She tilted her head and smirked, but there was an aching twinkle in her eye that proved her words were more than true.

“Shut up,” you dismissed her as you took a sip, but it was only because your cheeks were tingeing pink.

“Hey,” she quipped, reaching forward and placing her hand dangerously north on your thigh. Her fingertips landed right under the fabric of your dress, and it took everything in Wanda’s will to not glide her hand straight upwards. “Really, I’m serious. It’s your birthday, and I want to celebrate it.”

“We are celebrating,” you lulled, gesturing to the room filled with people and balloons and music. “This is a celebration!”

Wanda rolled her eyes and scooched closer to you, tilting her head and seductively whispering, “I have a present for you.”

Her grip on your thigh tightened, and you watched her tongue playfully line her top row of teeth before her lips broke into a devilish smile—she had something planned. You could hardly start to guess what her plans were because she was letting her hand slip farther up. She let one of her fingers press down on your flesh, targeting a bruise under the thin fabric that reminded you of your night with her a few nights ago. The bruise was still there on your thigh, and Wanda knew exactly where it was, and she was trying to tell you in your mind that she wanted more.

Before the message could fully conceptualize, someone suddenly stepped between the two of you. Wanda gasped and snatched her hand away, nearly falling off the stool as your father seemed to appear out of nowhere.

“Dad—” you gasped, suddenly sitting up straight and feeling awkward tension fill all the space in your lungs.

“Ladies,” he greeted, leaning up on his toes and looking between the two of you with a firm smile. You looked at Wanda past Tony and saw the terrified look on her face as Tony’s stare landed on her. He looked her up and down for a moment before snappily remarking, “So Wanda, tell me more about that terrorist group you were in. I am just so interested—”

“Dad!” you exclaimed, and he looked back at you innocently. You widened your eyes to tell him to fuck off, seeing Wanda grow more and more uncomfortable and guilty by the second.

“What? No anti-freedom organization talk? You guys are such party poopers.” The sarcasm in his voice was evident as he snatched your drink out of your hand and took a drink from it, taking a few slow steps backwards, his eyes trained on Wanda. The speed with which he backed away was so slow that it was a good ten seconds before he was finally out of proximity, rhythmically whispering a quick, “Don’t grope my daughter in front of me if you know what’s good for you,” before turning and speedwalking away with your drink still in his hand.

You let out the breath you were holding as Wanda only chuckled, knowing that Tony did approve of her but was nonetheless a protective albeit invasive father.

“You were saying?” you sighed, feeling aggravated at Tony’s need to insert himself in every situation with Wanda. A week ago, he tried to implement a three-feet distance rule between the both of you at dinners and meetings.

“Well,” Wanda chuckled, recovering from the awkwardness that Tony brought. It still didn’t kill her vibe apparently, because she smirked at you again and said, “I’m wondering if you want to see your present.”

“Okay…” you began, noticing that she wasn’t holding any box or bag. “Where is it?”

“It’s in your room.”

You paused, confused. You’d lived in the Avengers compound for a few years now, and surely Wanda wasn’t wanting to drag you all the way to the compound just to show you her present for you. “Wait, my room here?”

Wanda nodded and smiled deviously. “Come on.” Standing up, she grabbed your hand and tugged you off your seat, leaving you no choice but to scramble to catch your balance as she started dragging you up the stairs.

“Why did you put it in my teenager bedroom?” you questioned on the way up the stairs. “Did you go into my room when you first got here? Why couldn’t you just put it on the table with all the other ones? If it’s a ring for you to propose to me with, I’m telling you right now it’s gonna be a no.”

Opening the door to your room, Wanda placed her hand on your back and guided you in first. You looked around at the room you lived in as a teenager. The purple walls and boy band posters were so far gone from your current tastes that the sight made you wonder if you were ever sane in your teenagerhood. You heard the door close behind you which reminded you to search for a present, but the room looked completely normal with no present in sight. As you opened your mouth to ask what was going on, you felt Wanda press against your back.

Your breath stifled as Wanda’s hands rested on your waist and slid up your sides, traversing to your upper arms until they were resting on your shoulders, her fingers nestled under the thin straps of your dress.

Wanda’s lips came close to your ear, her warm breath fanning over the expanse of your neck as she whispered huskily, “Are you ready for your birthday present, babygirl?”

Unsure of what exactly she was referring to as your present, you nodded anyway, her voice putting you under her trance. Her hands slipped farther under the straps of fabric on your shoulders and held them, slowly pulling them apart so that she could let them slide down your shoulders. Pressing closer to you, she reached down to the already low neckline of your dress and pulled it down further until your bare breasts were out, her hands immediately cupping them as she moaned behind you.

“So soft,” Wanda whispered, consuming your neck with hungry kisses and setting your body ablaze with the way she groped and fondled your tits, her thumbs pressing over your hardening nipples as she massaged the tender flesh.

“Wanda,” you gasped, turning your head to the side so that she could access more of your neck to sloppily kiss, and you gasped softly when her teeth sunk into your skin a few times.

“Baby,” she groaned, pressing herself even closer against you. When she dug her hips right against your ass, your eyes, which had remained closed as you endured her gentle touches on your body, popped open as you felt something hard pressing against your ass from under the fabric of Wanda’s pants.

A warm shiver bloomed throughout your body as Wanda grunted and dug her crotch against you, her hands on your chest keeping you still. You now began to realize what your birthday present was as Wanda started moving you towards the bed. Shuffling towards it, your thighs hit the mattress and Wanda immediately pushed you over at the waist, your face hitting the sheets as a pair of hands groped your ass.

“I know how much you like to be fucked like a dirty slut,” Wanda’s labored voice spoke as she kneaded the flesh on your ass, keeping her groin right against the back of your thigh. “Are you?” She slowly peeled the fabric of your dress over your ass between her words, settling the end of your dress at your hips and leaving your behind completely bare. “My dirty slut?”

She punctuated her question with a slap to your cheek, and you squeaked and jumped forward, more warmth developing in the pit of your stomach. “Y-yes,” you bashfully admitted, earning a hum of approval from Wanda as she entertained herself with your ass.

“Good girl, you are my dirty slut,” she spoke as her hand roamed down to your thin panties, pushing them aside so that she could suddenly cup your slit, groaning as she felt how soaked you were. “Already so wet for me.” She swam her fingers through your folds, every movement earning a soft gasp from your lips.

She dragged her fingers down to your clit, finding it instantly and rubbing it for a moment before she slid her hand back up until she found your entrance, slipping two fingers in without warning.

Your hands grabbed at the sheets as you felt Wanda’s fingers explore you, your face pressed against the mattress as you reeled at the helpless position you were in which only added to the moisture that Wanda was exploring. She pushed her fingers all the way inside, pressing around all of your pulsing walls before she slid them out, and when she pushed them back in, there were three fingers this time, as well as resistance.

“So fucking tight,” Wanda groaned, pressing her hardness against you. “I’m gonna need to stretch you before you can take my cock.”

Her mere words were enough to get you squirming on the bed as the woman behind you violated your hole, stretching her three fingers out wide inside you and pumping them just like that. Whines filled the room as you squirmed on the bed, your noises only adding to Wanda’s desire as she grabbed at your ass and fingered you, nearly drooling in anticipating for when she could finally put her new strap inside you.

“Fuck, I can’t wait any longer,” Wanda groaned, removing her fingers from you and wiping the wetness on your ass, leaving you empty and unfulfilled. Internally throbbing, you listened to the sound of a zipper and fabric shuffling before Wanda pressed against you again, and this time you felt the tip of her cock rest against your entrance.

“Wanda…” you breathed as you calculated how big it was just from the tip teasing your hole. It was definitely bigger than anything you’d ever taken.

“It’s your birthday, slut, and you’re gonna take my present like a grateful whore, right?” Wanda halfway mumbled through her heavy breaths of excitement. When you didn’t answer, she slapped your ass, earning a shriek and an incoherent noise of confirmation.

Wanda spat into her hand and rubbed it on your entrance before she grabbed both of your hips to steady you, easing her cock inside you. Your mouth fell open as her girthy size stretched you out around her, and the stinging pain made you hiss and grab a fistful of the sheets.

“That’s it,” Wanda gently whispered, spreading your cheeks open to help spread you more. “Take my cock like a good girl, baby.”

“Wanda, it hurts,” you whined as she stopped halfway in to let you breathe. You already felt so full, but Wanda continued to push further inside you.

“You can take it,” she firmly said, stifling a groan as she pushed herself all the way inside you until her hips were flat against your ass and her cock pressed against your cervix.

“Fuck,” you groaned, clenching your teeth at the pain as she dragged herself back out halfway and slowly thrust in again.

Wanda continued her slow thrusts for a while until you finally eased up, and she marked her new objective with a sudden snap of her hips which drove herself deep inside you and elicited a sharp moan from you, and then she started to thrust her hips wildly into you.

“Look at you, taking me so well,” she said as she leaned forward and grabbed a fistful of your hair, yanking your upper body off the bed and arching your back which sent her cock hitting a new angle inside you.

She fucked you like that, bent over the bed, dress only covering your midsection, grabbing your hair, fondling your breasts and rubbing your clit, until your body had had enough of all the pleasurable sensations, and a coil of pressure formed in your stomach and threatened to snap at any moment.

“Wanda, I’m close,” you whined, and from the sounds Wanda was making behind you and the lack of pace in her wild thrusts, she was too.

“Cum for me, babygirl,” she grunted, leaning down and nuzzling her face into the crook of your neck and finding a patch of skin to bite as your orgasm unleashed simultaneously with hers.

For a moment, you didn’t realize Wanda reaching down and squeezing the base of her strap until you felt liquid gushing deep inside you, prolonging the aftereffects of your climax.

“Take my cum,” Wanda groaned as she kept short thrusts into you, making sure she was as deep as possible inside you as she filled you with her faux cum. “Take every drop, whore.”

“Fuck,” you moaned, feeling like you could cum again just from the feeling of her pounding her cum deep inside you.

Finally, her strap was emptied, and you both were coming down from your highs, Wanda panting against your neck and holding your breasts, resting her full weight on top of you. You panted under her, your walls twitching around her cock that lay still inside you.

After a few minutes, Wanda finally moved off you, slowly pulling out of you and finding her strap covered in a mix of your juices. Not only were your inner thighs a complete wet mess and your panties ruined, but a drop of Wanda’s cum was already starting to leak out of you. She reached forward and used her finger to push her cum back inside you, taking your legs and pressing them closed.

“Better keep your thighs shut for the rest of the night, baby,” she coyly said as she pulled your dress back down over your ass, helping you to stand up which proved hard because of how weak and shaky your legs felt and how sore you were between them.

As you stood, you could feel her cum move inside you and threaten to gush out. Wanda fixed the top of your dress for you and fixed your messy hair before wiping away some of your makeup that had smeared. As much as she tried to fix you up, it was still evident that you had just been fucked.

“Wanda,” you whined when you could feel wetness seeping out of you, trying to shut your thighs to keep it from coming out. “I can’t go back to the party.”

“Oh, but you have to, baby. It’s your own birthday party,” she said with an edge of amusement as she smirked deviously. This was her plan all along, to give you her little (big) present and then spend the rest of the party watching you miserably try to keep her cum inside you.

“You’re evil,” you whined, throwing yourself against her as she chuckled and wrapped her arms around you, letting her hands fall down to your ass and grab you. If you didn’t have a party to attend, she could have easily taken you again.

“Happy birthday, angel,” Wanda whispered with a kiss to the top of your head.

#wanda maximoff x reader #wanda maximoff #scarlet witch #marvel #lgbt #lesbian #wanda maximoff x f!reader #wanda maximoff x y/n #top!wanda #dom!wanda

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081314 · 1 year

Text

Sunset Savannah’s Tamashina-Mina – Episode 2 (Part 1)

Following is part 1 of my translation of Episode 2 of the Tamashina-Mina event. This part contains episodes 2-1 to 2-3.

Spoilers after the cut!

Episode 2-1

Leona: We made it.

Grim: Woah! So this is Sunset Savannah.

Leona: Yup. This is Sunrise City - the imperial capital, and also my hometown. Allow me to welcome ya'll to my sordid abode.

Jack: Ah- It’s hot….

Vil: It’s certainly hotter than it is back at Sage’s Island and the Shaftlands. Even the air here feels different.

Kalim: Everything is so bright and pretty!

Lilia: Indeed. And it’s quite uncommon for a large metropolis like this to have so much greenery in it.

Leona: That’s thanks to this country’s conviction, which we’re all so grateful for. The people here value “coexistence with nature” more than anythin’ else, and we make sure to conserve natural areas like this so the local animals have places to live, since they’re our ancestors and all.

Lilia: So what do you think, Leona? You feeling nostalgic about returning to your homeland after so long?

Leona: The opposite. I’m sick of lookin’ at this place. It never changes.

Lilia: Oh, really? I haven’t been to Sunset Savannah in quite a while, and it appears to have completely transformed since the last time I was here. The city back then wasn’t really developed very much, and they didn’t have any of these skyscrapers or whatnot.

Leona: That woulda been decades ago. Even back when my dad was healthy an’ ruled over the country, development of the city had already started.

Vil: I’ve also been to Sunrise City countless times before, but each time I come here I can’t help but be astounded by what an amazing place it is.

Leona: Amazing? You know… For folks who only come here once in a while just to kick back and relax, I guess that’s about what they’d think.

Vil: What is up with you? You keep beating around the bush about something.

Leona: Kalim, Scalding Sands is a hot and dry country like this one, right?

Kalim: Uh-huh. Most of my country is desert. But there’s a canal that runs through my hometown, Silk City, so it’s actually not too hot there. It used to be a huge problem trying to find enough drinking water, but we don’t have to worry about that anymore.

Leona: I’d wager that’s ‘cause the folks who run the government over there are proactive about adoptin’ new technologies, and they’ve been workin’ hard to improve the living conditions of your people.

Sunset Savannah is mostly made up of arid land. We ain’t got any deserts, but water’s still a precious resource for us. Unlike Scalding Sands, however, the development of infrastructure here is pretty much nonexistent. We even got people who still live off well water.

Folks here are so conscientious they’ll go out of their way to adapt to the land in whatever ways they can, and their whole lives are spent subject to the whims of mother nature. That’s why we still have this stupid festival to pray for rain every year.

There’s tons of natural resources underneath these lands, and if we’d just set up some large-scale mining operations then no doubt we’d be a lot better off. But everybody’s way too concerned about “coexistence with nature” or whatever. I doubt urban development ever even crosses their minds. It’s a lot different from Scalding Sands, huh?

Vil: So it’s not that the people here are unable to develop the infrastructure, it’s that they’re purposefully avoiding doing it… Something like that?

Leona: Yeah.

Lilia: Hmm. I don’t think that’s entirely a bad thing. As far as arbitrary development is concerned, if you spend enough money, it’s easily doable. And that’s why you’ll find modernized towns all over the world. But trying to develop an area and preserve the surrounding nature at the same time, like what they’re doing here? That’s astronomically more difficult.

Leona: My, what an exemplary response. If my big brother heard you sayin’ something that, he’d be beggin’ you through his tears to tell that to me, too.

Kalim: Your big brother, huh. Isn’t he the leader of this country right now?

Leona: My dad is the king, but he’s been sick in bed for a while. Falena, the first in line to the throne, has been runnin’ this place the past few years.

Kalim: I’ll need to be sure to say "Hi" to your brother! I’ll tell him how you and me always have so much fun together, Leona!

Leona: I don’t remember ever havin’ fun with you.

Lilia: We should give him our greetings, as well! I’m sure it’ll be fine if we just say something that sounds nice, right?

Vil: We’ll need to tell him all about how hardworking and kind our dear friend Leona is.

Grim: And I’ll tell him that Leona’s my henchman’s henchman!

Leona: Fat chance he’d come meet a bunch of tourists. We’re talking about the guy who’s the chief executive of the whole country. Sorry, but I ain’t in the mood to go see him, either. Why, I’m shakin’ in my boots just at the thought of havin' an audience with his royal majesty. Heh.

Vil: Oh, really? That’s a shame.

(A car pulls up)

Kalim: Ah! Here comes my ride. I’ll need to get headed to the hotel now.

Lilia: Leaving already, Kalim? That’s no fun. Here, why don’t you tell us what hotel you’re staying at? We can hang out together tonight.

Leona: As if ya even need to ask him. No doubt he’s staying at the Sunset Villa hotel.

Kalim: Hmm, let’s see here… Hey, you’re right! “Sunset Villa hotel!!!! (Don’t forget it)” …is what it says here on this note that Jamil left me. How did you know, Leona?

Leona: We don’t got many hotels that are luxurious enough to house guests of the state. It’s the same place we're gonna be stayin' at.

Kalim: Really? Awesome! It’ll be so much fun being together with everyone.

Vil: Sounds like you really did book us a proper hotel, Leona.

Kalim: Bye you guys! Let’s meet up later!

(Kalim gets into the car and departs)

Lilia: How about we go do some sightseeing now?

Vil: Good idea.

Jack: Man, it’s hot…..

Leona: Was wonderin’ when you’d finally pipe up, but you’re just saying the same thing you did before. You honestly think it’s that hot?

Yuu: Yeah, it’s pretty hot out!

Leona: That’s just your imagination talkin’. Deal with it. Sunset Savannah is a lot longer than it is wide, and we got a lot of tall mountains that are high above sea level. The climate changes completely from one area to the next, but the average temperature in Sunrise City is a bit higher than it is at school.

Jack: B-but still… Isn’t it really hot here….? Argh…. I’m dripping with sweat….

Leona: I mean, the UV rays in Sunset Savannah are really strong. A lot more than in other countries.

Vil: Thank goodness I applied ample sunscreen before we left.

Lilia: And I’m glad I brought my sun visor! I took every possible measure I could before coming here.

Grim: I've been standing in your guys’ shadows this whole time so I’m A-okay!

Lilia: My, aren’t you a clever one. That’s something I do quite often, myself.

Jack: …..

Leona: ….Jack? Hey, you alright?

Jack: I…. I’m fine….

Leona: Cut the crap! Your face is gettin’ paler by the second. Hurry up and go sit down in the shade over there!

Jack: I’m fine…. I….

(Jack collapses and falls on top of Grim)

Everyone: JACK!?

Jack: ….

Vil: He collapsed all of a sudden…. And he isn’t responding when I call his name.

Leona: This isn’t good... He probably got heat exhaustion.

Lilia: He’s unconscious. This is an emergency!

Grim: Waaaah! I’m stuck under Jack!

Yuu: Somebody help!!

Leona: Calm down! We need to bring him somewhere he can rest and look for something to cool him down with…

???: You seem to have quite the problem on your hands, Lord Leona.

Leona: !? You’re….

Everyone: ?

Grim: Who’s this guy?

Episode 2-2

???: Now I understand. I’ll go ahead and perform a physical examination, then.

Jack: Ugh.

???: Hmm. Just as Lord Leona surmised, you appear to be ailing from heat exhaustion. Come, let’s get you in the shade and I’ll patch you up for the time being.

Vil: Leona, may I ask who this is? You two appear to know each other.

Leona: *Sigh* This guy’s the head chamberlain of Sunset Savannah, and he serves the royal family.

Kifaji: My name is Kifaji, and I’m pleased to make the acquaintance of Lord Leona’s school companions.

Vil: A pleasure to meet you. I’m Vil Schoenheit.

Kifaji: Ah, yes. I recognized you immediately. We are truly honored to have a distinguished model such as yourself come visit us.

Lilia: I’m Lilia, from Briar Valley. Nice to meet you.

Grim: And I’m Grim!

Yuu: Name’s Yuu! Nice to meet you.

Kifaji: My, what a lively bunch. Thank you all for coming.

Leona: Anyways, your timing was pretty impeccable.

Kifaji: I noticed it was about time for you to arrive and came here to welcome you, Lord Leona.

Leona: Hah. Don’t make me laugh. I bet you swung by just to check whether or not I even showed up. You seriously don’t trust me, huh.

Kifaji: What a terrible thing to say. I wonder, which one of us is it that doesn’t trust the other?

Jack: A…augh…

Leona: Ya comin’ to, Jack?

Jack: S-sorry. I got super dizzy all of a sudden and blacked out before I realized what was going on…

Kifaji: Master Jack, please have a sip of this water.

(Jack drinks the water)

Jack: Haaah….. I feel a little better now…

Vil: You sure gave us quite the shock back there.

Leona: You idiot…. You should’ve dressed more appropriately for the heat. The hell did you come in your school uniform for?

Jack: I’m sorry. I…. I don’t do good in hot weather.

Leona: Yeah, I know. …I should’ve given you a heads up before we came.

Grim: Huh!? Leona’s admitting up front that he made a mistake…!

Leona: Why’re you actin’ so surprised?

Kifaji: We don’t want your condition to worsen any further. You’ll need to rest today.

Leona: Yeah.

Jack: What!? I don’t need any freakin’ rest! The tournament starts tomorrow… We have to train today…! Heat exhaustion isn’t even a big deal…. I’m going to our practice session with you guys!

Lilia: It is a big deal. You mustn't push yourself so much.

Vil: He’s right, Jack. That one-track mind of yours can be a real virtue, but sometimes it can also be your undoing. Anyways, we’re guests in a foreign land right now, so really you need to stop being so unreasonable.

Jack: But… But Leona Senpai’s counting on me… He chose me as a member of the team and everything… I’d feel awful if we couldn’t compete in the tournament just ‘cause of something stupid like this…!

Leona: If you’re feelin’ sorry, then zip it and listen to us already. You need to rest.

Jack: B-but…

Leona: You’ll just end up dragging us down in the condition you’re in. I’m kicking you off the team.

Jack: No....!!

Leona: This is an order from your dorm warden. You understand, right?

Jack: Dammit…. I’m really sorry…!

Leona: I told ya already, I’m the one who messed up. Don’t make me say it again. You tryin’ to make me look bad or something?

Kifaji: You were talking about Catch the Tail just now, correct? Might I presume you all are members of the Night Raven College Team that will be competing in the tournament?

Leona: Yup. Remember I asked ya to keep a spot open for 'em in the tournament?

Kifaji: Yes, and I’ve made the proper preparations. However, you never revealed your reasons for doing all this. Could it be…. You’re attempting to shirk your responsibility of performing the “Lessons of the Guardian”?

Leona: Nice guess. You’ve always been sharp as a tack, Kifaji.

Kifaji: Goodness gracious. That cunning nature of yours hasn’t changed one bit. What a pity. It’s your job to perform the “Lessons of the Guardian”, and that’s something you should take pride in. I should hope you'd adopt an attitude more befitting of a member of the royal family. To begin with, you’re always so-

Leona: Tsch. Here we go again with the damn lectures. It doesn't matter whether or not I go around actin' like I'm royalty. It's not like anybody cares.

Kifaji: ….Lord Leona, you really shouldn’t say something like that. Well then, I shall go ahead and accompany Master Jack to the hotel.

Leona: ‘Kay, sounds good.

(Kifaji departs)

Leona: …….. Wait a sec, Kifaji. We’ll go with ya.

Episode 2-3

Leona: Here we are. This is Sunset Villa, the hotel ya’ll are gonna stay at.

Grim: Holy cow! Talk about luxurious!!! I wish I could live here forever!

Leona: It’s the most high-end hotel in the entire country.

Lilia: What a magnificent place this is. Any patient should be able to recuperate in peace here.

Vil: Ah, Kifaji’s come back.

Kifaji: I’ll go ahead and begin my report now. I have taken Master Jack to the room we prepared for him, and I’ve also made arrangements for a personal doctor and nurses to look after him.

Leona: Nice work. Alright, now we need to go look for you-know-who.

Vil: And just who would that be?

(The camera pans around the room and then Kalim appears)

Kalim: Hey! You guys made it.

Leona: Perfect timing. We were just lookin’ for ya, Kalim.

Kalim: Hm? Is something the matter, Leona?

Kifaji: ….Don’t tell me!?

Leona: Kalim, you gotta enter the Catch the Tail tournament.

Everyone: !?

Kalim: Huh? Me? You mean join your guys’ team?

Leona: Yup. There’s three players to a team, but Jack ended up passin’ out from the heat so we’re a man down.

Kalim: Oh no! Is he okay!?

Leona: Yeah. But at this rate, Vil and Lilia aren’t gonna be able to compete in the tournament at all. We need one more player.

Lilia: Hmm. You're correct, however…

(Vil, Leona, and Lilia huddle together and start whispering)

Vil: Are you sure about this?

Leona: I know, I know. Compared to Jack, Kalim’s a pretty cruddy athlete. But havin’ him on the team is better than getting disqualified. Just think about it for a second. We got Yuu, who hardly knows anything about the world; Grim, who doesn’t listen to a word anybody says; and Jamil, who’s lord knows where right now. We pretty much got no other choice but to have Kalim join us.

Leona: So whadya think, Kalim? Your “buddies” are in a real jam here… You’ll help us out, right?

Kifaji: You stop right there!

Leona: Huh?

Kifaji: Master Kalim was formally invited to our country as a guest of the state. It is out of the question for him to take part in the tournament! He could get injured! If something were to befall him, the repercussions of such an incident would rock the peoples’ trust in the state.

Leona: Humph. You’re as stuffy as ever. Listen, Kifaji. All I’m tryin’ to do is enjoy my homeland’s festival with my school friends. I can’t even begin to tell ya how much Vil and Lilia have been lookin’ forward to competing in the tournament. And Grim and Yuu - they came all the way out here just to cheer on their friends. Wouldn’t it be a real shame if we turned them away now and just sent ‘em packin'?

Vil: My, what kind words. You’re moving me to tears.

Leona: Besides, if they don't get to compete, poor Jack’s gonna end up blamin’ himself for everything. I’d never wanna put my precious Kouhai through somethin’ like that.

Vil: Oh, and he even mixed in some concern for Jack!

Lilia: This loquacity is quite unlike him.

Leona: So what’ll it be, Kalim?

Kalim: Of course I’ll join you guys! I’d never just stand by if you’re in trouble. Besides, this Catch the Tail stuff sounds really fun.

Leona: Awesome, then it’s settled!

Kifaji: Nothing is settled!!

Leona: Oh, come on, Kifaji. You heard him, didn’t you? Our dear guest of the state himself, Master Kalim from Scalding Sands, said he wants to compete with us. Letting him join is what a member of the royal family should do, as a show of good faith an’ all.

Kifaji: Ack…. You always had quite the way with words. How I wish you’d employ such talent in other endeavors!

Leona: Stop stickin’ your nose into other people’s business, would ya? Anyways. Kalim, you gotta keep this a secret from the other Scalding Sands guests that are here. Especially Jamil.

Kalim: Huh? But why?

Leona: Jack’s just about drownin’ in shame right now ‘cause of this whole mess…. It’d be awful if everyone found out about it, don’t ya think?

Kalim: Yeah, you’re right. Okay, I won’t tell anyone!

Vil: ….If Jamil were to catch wind of this, no doubt he’d do everything in his power to put a stop to it.

Lilia: He might just end up fainting from shock when he sees Kalim step out into the arena tomorrow.

Leona: Now that everything’s cleared up, we need to start gettin' ready for Catch the Tail. They prepared outfits for ya'll to wear during the tournament, so go to your rooms an’ get changed.

Episode 1

Episode 2 (Part 2)

Episode 3 (Part 1)

Episode 3 (Part 2)

Episode 3 (Part 3)

Episode 4 (Part 1)

Episode 4 (Part 2)

Episode 5

#leona kingscholar #lilia vanrouge #vil schoenheit #kalim al asim #jack howl #twst spoilers #twst #twisted wonderland #tamashina-mina #my tl

411 notes · View notes

canmom · 3 months

Text

The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere, 000-012

Or, what if that mural was the heart of a web serial.

I'm reading The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere, thanks largely to the enthusiasm of @azdoine and @lukore on my dash over the last few months.

This is absolutely not gonna be a liveblog in the level of detail of the great Umineko liveblog project. Rather I'm gonna be aiming at something like the comics comints series or those occasional posts on anime. Or indeed what I wrote about Worth The Candle last year. I must create a robot whose purpose is to watch to see if I start writing detailed plot summaries and hit me with a stick labelled 'remember you have a job now'.

That outta the way, let's talk flower!

youtube

No, not that flower!

I will start with an anecdote. When I was at university, I ended up attending a talk by court alchemist senescence researcher Aubrey de Grey, who at that time did not yet have a 'sexual harassment allegations' section on his Wikipedia page. The main thing that struck me at the time was his rather spectacularly long beard. But I did listen to his talk about ending aging.

de Grey's schtick is that he, like many people in the transhumanist milieu, believes that medical technology is on the cusp of being able to prevent aging sufficiently well to prolong human lifespans more or less indefinitely. He believes that the different processes of aging can be understood in terms of various forms of accumulating cellular 'damage', and that these will begin to be addressed within present human lifespans, buying time for further advancements - so that (paraphrasing from memory) 'the first immortals have already been born'. He has some pretty graphs to demonstrate this point.

At that talk, one of the audience members asked de Grey the (in my view) very obvious question about whether access to this technology would be distributed unevenly, creating in effect an immortal ruling class. de Grey scoffed at this, saying he always gets this question, and basically he didn't think it would be a big deal. I forget his exact words, but he seemed to assume the tech would trickle down sooner or later, and this was no reason not to pursue it.

I'm sure de Grey is just as tired of being reminded of how unbalanced access to medical technology is in our current world, or the differences in average life expectancy between countries.

So, I was very strongly reminded of de Grey as The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere laid out its major thematic concerns and characters. I was also put in mind of many online arguments in the transhumanist milieu about whether it would be a good thing, in principle, to end death.

In particular, of course, comes to mind transhumanist Nick Bostrom's short story The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant, in which death is likened to a huge dragon that demands to be fed trains full of humans every day. In the story, humanity's scientists secretly build a giant gun to kill the dragon. Naturally, despite all the doubters and naysayers who foolishly feel obliged to justify the existence of the dragon, the gun works. Bostrom's imagery is incredibly heavy-handed (particularly the trains à la Auschwitz), but just in case you didn't get it, he also spells out the moral explicit at the end: basically, every day not spent putting resources to abolishing death is adding up more and more bodies to the pile of people who don't get to be immortal.

So far, Flower seems to be shaping up to be a critical intervention into that milieu, with a much more grounded view of death and a much stronger model of society - admittedly not a high bar but it's going good so far!

At the time of writing this commentary, I have read the prologue and first two six-chapter arcs, namely Mankind's Shining Future (1-6) and Pilgrimage to the Deep (7-12).

the general shape of things

We are introduced - from the perspective of sardonic, introverted Su, who is going to be the protagonist of our time loop - to a group of brilliant young medical wizards, who have just been invited to visit the headquarters of a secret society whose mission is precisely to abolish death. Su's grandfather was some kind of controversial luminary who was expelled this organisation, and he also did something to her, which is giving her some kind of ulterior motive to find her way into this society.

We know pretty much from the outset that this is a time loop scenario: Su has been explicitly given the opportunity to replay the scenario in the hopes of find an alternative outcome, by some kind of presently mysterious parties. This first part is the 'control' loop, i.e. probably more or less how things went down 'originally'.

I believe Umineko is an explicit inspiration for this story, and the influence is pretty evident. But parallels with the Locked Tomb series, especially Gideon the Ninth, are also quite noticeable. @lukore spoke of it as the STEM to Locked Tomb's humanities, and I can already kinda see it, although we haven't got into the real meat of the scenario yet. This story began serialisation four years ago, making the two works roughly contemporary. The latest chapter was published in the last couple of weeks - no idea if I've arrived just in time for the ending!

Stylistically, it's generally pretty heavy on dialogue and long asides. The characters are a bunch of mega nerds who love to have big philosophical and political discussions, but their dynamics are well enough realised and their dynamics clear enough that it can double up as naturalistic characterisation. So far, the discussions have been interesting to read.

Below I'm going to make some notes and comments on various elements of the setting and story. In a followup post (because it got too long) I'm going to talk a lot about entropy. Perhaps you will find this interesting!

the world

The first few chapters are dedicated pretty hard to exposition. We find ourselves in a distant-future setting - one in which it seems reality has totally collapsed and then been rebuilt using magic, creating a somewhat oddball universe which lacks things like the element iron, and also electromagnetism. This seems like it would have pretty severe implications for just about everything!

However, the 'ironworkers' have, after producing a series of trial and error 'lower planes' that didn't quite get it right, landed on a fairly close approximation of how things used to be on the old world. Though by 'fairly close approximation' I mean like... it's a bowl-shaped world and the sun and stars are artificial lanterns. But still, there are humans, and they seem to work more or less like we're used to humans working, apart from the whole 'magic' thing.

So, an alt-physics setting. Praise Aealacreatrananda, I love that shit.

While electromagnetism might be out, the more abstract physical principles like thermodynamics still apply, and the humans of this universe have managed to find analogues to a number of things in our world. Instead of computers, they have 'logic engines' which run on magic. Horses seem to have made it in, so we get delightful blends of historical and futuristic concepts like a self-driving computer-controlled horse-drawn carriage taxi.

The biggest difference is of course that in this setting, magic - more on that in a bit - has solved most medical problems and humans routinely live to around 500. The setting is ostensibly a semi-post-scarcity one, although a form of money exists in 'luxury debt', which can be exchanged for things like taxi rides, café food and trips on the space elevator.

Politically, we are told that the world has enjoyed a few hundred years of general peace, broken in living memory by a revolution which put an end to a regime of magical secrecy. There are lots of countries, and an alliance overseeing them.

There's a few other oddities in this world. Something called a 'prosognostic event' can happen if you see someone who has the same face as you, and whatever this is, it's bad enough news that everyone is constantly reminded to veil their faces in public and there's some kind of infant 'distinction treatment' to mitigate the risk. Given that, in the regular world, nothing particularly bad would happen if you ran into a long-lost identical twin, it suggest there is probably something a little fucky about how humans work in this world!

There's evidently a fair bit of effort put into the worldbuilding of fictional countries and historical periods. The important elements seem to be roughly along the lines of:

our world is currently in what they call the 'old kingdoms' period, which is poorly remembered;

next up comes an 'imperial' period of high transhumanist shenanigans in which society was ruled by 'gerontocrats' who got exclusive access to the longevity treatment, but this all somehow led to a huge disaster which destroyed og earth;

the survivors built the Mimikos where humanity currently lives using magic and created some kind of huge iron spike that holds the universe together; there was subsequently a 'fundamentalist' period in which a strict cutoff point was put on human lifespans and a lot of the wackier magic was banned;

now we're onto a new era of openness following a small revolution, while the major political structures remain largely intact.

Writing a far-future setting is hard, because trying to deal with the weight of history without the story getting bogged down with worldbuilding details is a fiddly line to walk. The Dying Earth series of Jack Vance might be a relevant point of comparison. Vance leaves the historical details vague - there are endless old kingdoms and strange artefacts and micro-societies for Cugel and co. to stumble on. Far more important than the specifics of history is establishing the vibe of a world that's seen an unimaginable amount of events layered on top of each other and is honestly a bit tired.

Flower makes things a bit more concrete and generally manages to make this work decently well. I do appreciate the asides where Su talks about, for example, the different architectural styles that layer up to make a place, or the way a technique has been refined. It establishes both that Su is the kind of person to notice this sort of thing, and also helps the world feel lived-in.

the names

The story doesn't do a lot with language. The story is written in English, and the narration will occasionally make reference to how things are phrased (e.g. how divination predates the suffix -mancy). We can probably make the standard assumption that this is all translated from $future_language, with the notional translator making a suitable substitution of whatever linguistic forms exist in that language.

The characters are named in a variety of languages. Our main character's full name is Utsushikome of Fusai. We're told that this is "an old name from Kutuy, and means something like 'mysterious child'" - so Kutuyan is one of the languages spoken in this world. It's blatantly got the same phonotactics as Japanese, and indeed if I search up 'Utsushikome', I find an obscure historical figure called Utsushikome-no-Mikoto, wife of the Emperor Kōgen; she has no article on English Wikipedia, but she does have a brief one on Japanese wiki. Just as Su says about Kutuyan, 'Utsushikome' is written 欝色謎 in Japanese, but it relies on archaic readings of those characters and wouldn't read that way in modern Japanese. We could perhaps assume a good old translation convention is in effect where Kutuyan is replaced with Japanese.

A lot of characters have Greek names, as do various setting elements. One exception is Kamrusepa, or Kam, who is named for an ancient goddess of medicine worshipped by the Hittites and Luwians. I know basically fuck all about Hittites and Luwians but it's a cool little nod to mythology, and it won't be the only one!

I'll run down a list of characters and my comments about them in a bit. But many are named after gods or other mythological figures.

the magic

Most of the divergences come from magic existing. Certain humans are 'arcanists', who are able to use the 'Power', which is a magic system with a highly computational flavour. Thanks to Su's expositional asides, we know that an incantation is something like a short program written in cuneiform with the ability to gather information, perform maths, and manipulate particles. An example we are given is a spell called "entropy-denying", which is the following string of cuneiform:

"…(𒌍𒌷𒀭)(𒌍𒁁𒀭)𒅥𒌈𒆜𒈣𒂠, 𒋢𒀀𒅆𒌫𒃶,𒈬𒊹."

We're told that spells always start with phrases ending in 𒀭, and end in 𒊹. Beyond that, I'm not sure how far the author has actually worked out the syntax of this magic system - probably not in too much detail! Seems like the kind of thing it's better to leave vague, but also she seems like kind of nerd who would (positive). It's conceptually a reasonable magic system for a world where more or less realistic physics applies.

The use of unusual scripts for a magic system isn't that unusual - the old European occultists who wrote the [Lesser] Key of Solomon loved to write on their magic circles in Hebrew, and in modern times we could mention Yoko Taro's signature use of the Celestial Alphabet for example - but the specific use of cuneiform here seems like it might be a little more significant, because a little later in the story the characters encounter a mural depicting The Epic of Gilgamesh, which of course was recorded on cuneiform tablets. Remains to be seen exactly what these allusions will mean!

The magic system is divided into various disciplines defined by the different ways they approach doing magic, with the disciplines breaking down broadly along the same lines as the modern scientific disciplines. For example, our protagonist is a thanatomancer ("necromancer" having become unfashionable), which is the discipline dealing with death; she's specifically an entropic thanatomancer, distinguished by their framework viewing death as the cessation of processes.

Magic relies on an energy that they refer to as 'eris' (unknown relation to the Greek goddess of strife and discord). We are told that eris must be carefully apportioned across the elements of a spell or shit blows up, that it can be stored, and it accumulates gradually enough that you don't want to be wasteful with it, but so far given little information about where it comes from.

Magic in this story generally seems to act as a kind of 'sufficiently advanced technology'. It's very rules-based, and used for a lot of mundane ends like operating computers or transport. Advancement in magic is something like a combination of basic research and software development. But the thing that makes it a magic system and not merely alt-physics is that it's at least a little bit personal: it must be invoked by an individual, and only certain people can operate the magic. We're told a little about how wizards are privileged in some societies, indoctrinated in social utility in others, and expected to be inconspicuous in the present setting. It's not clear yet if you need some kind of special innate capacity to do the magic, or if it's just a matter of skill issue.

With one exception, our main characters are a gaggle of wizards, and exceptionally skilled students at that. They're at an elite institution, carrying high expectations, even if they are themselves fairly dismissive of the pomp and ceremony. They have grandiose plans: Kamrusepa in particular is the main voice of the 'death should be abolished' current.

the cast

We're entering a cloistered environment with high political stakes hanging off of it. Even if I hadn't already heard it described as a murder mystery, it would feel like someone will probably be murdered at some point, so lets round up our future suspects.

Su (Utsushikome) is our protagonist and first-person POV. She's telling this story in the first past tense, with a style calling to mind verbal narration; she'll occasionally allude to future events so we know for sure narrator!Su knows more than present!Su. She's got a sardonic streak and she likes long depressing antijokes, especially if the punchline is suicide. She will happily tell us she's a liar - so maybe her narration isn't entirely reliable, huh.

Su is more than a little judgemental; she doesn't particularly like a lot of her classmates, or people in general, and generally the first thing she'll tell you about a character is how well she gets on with them. She introduces the theme of 'wow death sucks' in the first paragraph, but she is, at least at this point, pessimistic that anyone will manage to do anything about it for good.

Her magical specialisation is entropic thanatomancy, roughly making processes go again after they working coherently.

Her name is a reference to an obscure Japanese empress, as discussed above.

Ran is Su's bestie from the same home country. She is generally pretty on the level. She likes romance novels and she is pretty sharp at analysing them. She will cheerfully team up with Su to do a bit or bait someone else when an argument gets going.

Her magical specialisation is Divination, which is sort of a more fundamental layer of magic, about gathering information by any means. In medicine it's super advanced diagnostics.

Her name is too short to pin down to a specific allusion. Could be one of a couple of disciple of Confucius such as Ran Geng, or a Norse goddess of the sea.

Kam (Kamrusepa) is the de facto class prez and spotlight lover. She's hardcore ideological, the story's main voice of the de Grey/Bostrom death-abolishing concept so far - I think she straight up calls someone a 'deathist' at some point. She loves to tell everyone what she thinks about everything, and getting the last word.

Her magical specialisation is Chronomancy, so time magic. It's described as secretive and byzantine, but also it can do stuff like (locally?) rewind time for about five minutes. No doubt it has something to do with the time loop.

As mentioned above, she's named after a fairly obscure ancient deity of healing and magic.

Theo (Theodoros) is a fairly minor character. He's scatterbrained and easily flustered, he has a similar background to our protagonist, and he's not great with people. His name is shared with a number of ancient Greek figures, so it's hard to narrow it down to one allusion. I don't think his magic school has been mentioned.

Ptolema is a cheery outgoing one, someone who Su dismisses as an airhead. And she is at least easy to bait into saying something ill-considered. Her specialisation is applying magic to surgery. As a character, she tends to act as a bit of a foil to the others. Bit of a valley girl thing going on.

'Ptolema' is presumably a feminised version of the renowned Greek philosopher Ptolemy.

Seth is the jock to Ptolema's prep, and our goth protag Su doesn't particularly like him either. ...lol maybe that's too flippant, I may be misapplying these US high school stereotypes. To be a little more precise then, he's pretty casual in demeanour, flirty, likes to play the clown. He specialises in Assistive Biomancy, which revolves around accelerating natural healing processes.

Seth is named for either the Egyptian god (domain: deserts, violence and foreigners) or an Abrahamic figure, the third son of Adam and Eve granted by God after the whole Caim killing Abel thing.

Ophelia is someone Su describes as 'traditionally feminine' - soft-spoken, demure etc. (Gender in this world appears to be constructed along broadly similar lines to ours). Indeed we get a fairly extended description of her appearance. Her specialisation is Alienist Biomancy, which means introducing foreign elements to healing (not entirely sure how that differs from the Golemancy mentioned later).

Ophelia is of course a major character in Shakespeare's Hamlet, best known for going mad and dying in a river.

Fang is the only nonbinary member of the class, noted as the most academically successful. They're not on the expedition, but the characters discuss them a little in their absence, so maybe they'll show up later. It seems like they have a bit of a rebellious streak. Their magical specialisation is not mentioned.

Fang is a regular ol' English word, but I gave it a search all the same and found there's an ancient Chinese alchemist of that name. She is the oldest recorded woman to do an alchemy in China, said to know how to turn mercury into silver.

Lilith is the teenaged prodigy in computers logic engines, and Mehit is her mother who accompanies her on the trip. They've got a big Maria and Rosa (of Umineko) dynamic going on, with Mehit constantly scolding Lilith and trying to get her to obey social norms, though in contrast to Maria, Lilith is a lot more standoffish and condescending to the rest of the gang. Lilith specialises in 'Golemancy', which means basically medical robotics - prosthetic limbs and such. She spends most of her time fiddling with her phone logic engine, and will generally tell anyone who talks to her that they're an idiot. Sort of a zoomer stereotype.

Lilith is named for the Abrahamic figure, the disobedient first wife of Adam who was banished and, according to some Jewish traditions, subsequently became a demon who attacks women at night. There may be some connection between Lilith and the lioness-headed Mesopotamian chimeric monster Lamashtu, which I mention because Mehit is an Egyptian and Nubian lion goddess.

'Golemancy' is probably playing on the popular fantasy idea of a 'golem' as a kind of magic robot, but given the Jewish allusion in Lilith's name here, I do wonder a little bit if it's going to touch on the Jewish stories of the Golem which inspired it - a protective figure with a specific religious dimension.

There are some other characters but they're not part of the main party on their way to the function, so I won't say much about them just yet. Also it's entirely possible I went and forgot an entire classmate or something, big whoops if so.

the events

In true Umineko tradition, the beginning of the story narrates in great detail how the protagonists make their way to the place where the plot is going to happen.

To be fair, there's a lot of groundwork to be laid here, and the characters' discussions do a lot to lay out the concerns of the story and sketch out the setting, not to mention establish the major character relations. A murder mystery takes a certain amount of setup after all! There's plenty of sci-fi colour to be had in the 'aetherbridge', which is a kind of space elevator that lifts you up to a high altitude teleporter network. (It's technically not teleportation but 'transposition', since teleportation magic also exists in the story, with different restrictions! But close enough for government work.)

They go to a huge space citadel, which is kind of a transport hub; some cloak and dagger shit happens to hide the route they must take to the mysterious secret organisation. They find a strange room with a missing floor and a mural of the Epic of Gilgamesh, albeit modified to render it cyclic. What does it meeaaaan?

The idea of a secret society of rationalists is one that dates back to the dawn of ratfic, in HPMOR. It was kinda dumb then, but it works a lot better here, where we're approaching the wizard circle from outside. The phrase 'Great Work' has already been dropped. I love that kind of alchemical shit so I'm well into finding out what these wizards are plotting.

the dying

A lot of the discussions revolve around the mechanics of death. Essentially the big problem for living forever is information decay. Simple cancers can be thwarted fairly easily with the magic techniques available, but more subtle genetic slippages start to emerge after the first few hundred years; later, after roughly the 500 year mark, a form of dementia becomes inevitable. It's this dementia in particular that the characters set their sights on curing.

One thing that is interesting to me is that, contra a lot of fantasy that deals with necromancy (notably the Locked Tomb series), there appears to be no notion of a soul in this world whatsoever. The body is all that there is. Indeed, despite all the occult allusions in the character names, there is very little in the way of religion for that matter. Even the 'fundamentalism' is about an idea of human biological continuity that shouldn't be messed with too much.

Su distinguishes three schools of thought on death, namely 'traditional', 'transformative' and 'entropic'. The 'traditional' form attempts to restore limited function - classic skeleton shit. 'Transformative' sees death as a process and uses dead tissues together with living in healing. Su's 'entropic' school broadens this 'process' view to consider death as any kind of loss of order - a flame going out as much as an organism dying. At the outset of the story, Su has discovered a 'negentropic' means to restore life to an organism, which she considers promising, even if for now it only works for fifteen minutes.

This is an interesting perspective, but the devil is in the details. Because processes such as life or flames, necessarily, result in a continuous increase in the thermodynamic entropy of the universe. And yet this idea of death-as-loss-of-order does make a kind of sense, at a certain level of abstraction.

Elaborating on this got rather too long for this post, and I think it can stand alone, so I'm going to extract it to a followup post.

the comments

As is probably evident by the length of this post, I am very intrigued by The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere. The setting is compelling, and it seems like it's got the willingness to bite at the chewy questions it raises instead of acting like it has all the answers, which is I think one of the most crucial elements for this kind of scifi. I like how unabashed it is at having its characters straight-up debate shit.

Of course, this all depends where they go with it. There's so many ways it could be headed at this point. I hear where it's going is 'dark yuri' and 'Umineko-inspired murder mystery', so that should be really juicy fun, but I do end up wondering what space that will leave to address the core theme it's laid out in these first few chapters.

Overall, if this and Worth the Candle are what modern ratfic is like, the genre is honestly in pretty good shape! Of course, I am reading very selectively. But this is scratching the itch of 'the thing I want out of science fiction', so I'm excited to see where the next 133 chapters will take me.

Though all that said, I ended up writing this post all day instead of reading any other chapters or working, so I may need to rein it in a bit.

#fiction #web serials #the flower that bloomed nowhere #tftbn #sff

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max1461 · 3 months

Note

What are your longtermism objections? The two broad camps seem to be 1. Rejection of future people's inclusion into moral circle, defense of steep discount rates, you have to exist yet to be a moral patient. Vs 2. Future people matter but there's nothing relevant or desirable in our action space.

Some people break down "can" vs "should" to make longtermism a conjunction of three things (future people matter, we can do something about it, and we should) but for me I think the should follows from the can (this is a personal preference that applies to this specific case), so for me it's two.

Do you think the 1 vs 2 distinction works satisfactorily? Or are they more entwined for you? Or do you want to throw out my prompt and start over from scratch?

I think that future people matter, but

It's hard to predict except in a very coarse way what their desires will be, making it difficult to determine what doing right by them would constitute.

It's extremely hard to make meaningful predictions beyond the near-term, making evaluating the long term effects of most actions in a meaningful way impossible.

The upshot of these two facts taken together is that while I do think "we should try not to end the world, somewhat" is a very reasonable position, more flamboyant forms of longtermism that aim at things like "steering human technological and social development to direct the maximal amount of matter and energy in the future light cone towards the end of human flourishing" and so on are goofy.

I said "they might be evil if they weren't so dumb" because this kind of totalizing impulse to engineer society to a specific end has in the past been the domain of, you know, Hitler and Stalin. But my impression is that longtermism is mostly composed of internet posters' sci-fi daydreams and venture capitalists' marketing hype, and I don't think we're going to get EAdolf Ratler any time soon.

Anyway, per the second paragraph I am sympathetic to the "plausible concern in the next century or so" type stuff that sometimes gets talked about under the heading of x-risk, e.g. efforts to avert nuclear war, climate change, another pandemic, and indeed (as mentioned in the post) intelligent AI misalignment. I don't think we're in for an AI apocalypse any time soon but I think it's always good to have someone thinking about these things.

#society

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stirringwinds · 7 months

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ozymandias

Snippet from a Yao and Arthur-centric WIP i'm working on, set in 1853–a decade after the first Opium War, and on the eve of the Perry Expedition's arrival in Japan. CW: Imperialism, allusions to real historical events in 19th century Asia.

"But you are here because of Alfred, no?" Now, Yao's glance is one of open mockery. "Wistfully keeping the tabs on the unfilial son who threw away your name and walked out of your house—because you simply cannot help it.”

“Please,” Arthur snorts. He takes a deliberate sip from his tea. “You ascribe to me rather more sentimentality than is realistic, Yao.”

What did Alfred’s impudence matter anymore, in the sixteenth year of Victoria’s reign, when even wider swathes of the world flew under the commanding presence of the Union Jack?

“Have I?” Yao leans back in his chair, his expression nonchalant. “Well, either that—or you are starting to feel rather concerned. As to whether Alfred’s growing interest in the Pacific might threaten your newly-acquired, ill-gotten gains around here, no?”

“Ill-gotten? Rather ironic coming from you, I should think.” Arthur shoots back. The cup of sencha is warm between his fingers. He deliberately casts a glance around the richly furnished room, at the elegant, serpentine dragon painted on the folding screen behind Yao. “As I recall you sneering—didn’t you conquer a vast empire from the Central Asian steppes to the shores of the Pacific, long before I even crawled out of the mud of the Thames?”

Yao chuckles, his dark eyes narrowing. His voice is soft, but no less dangerous. “You know, I miss the good old days where it was either you behaving yourself—or having your head chopped off, and that being the end of it." His lip curls. “But alas, the Treaty of Nanking ties my hands.”

In another time and place, Arthur knows he might’ve felt dread. But not here, not now, with the light and heady power of industrial technology running through his veins. What had he to fear, from this ancient and proud, but crumbling wreck of an empire, whose bitter barbs betrayed only his weakness?

“Alas, it does, indeed. Not quite so agreeable when the shoe is on the other foot for once, is it?”

“This is far from the first setback I’ve faced,” Yao smiles frostily. “I’m old. Older than you can possibly imagine. I have seen many of our kind burn bright—and short.” The millennia-old weight of his stare is heavy and oppressive. “This grandiose empire you are so proud of is not even three centuries old. Don’t get too comfortable.”

#hetalia #hws china #hws england #wang yao #arthur kirkland #my writing #wip #Yao has lived such a long life and mmm I always think of those layers that lends to him #and his identity

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mask131 · 26 days

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The Tolkienesque Renaissance and the woman-wizard

A long time ago I made a brief post about my personal vision of a certain "Tolkienesque Renaissance" era within English-speaking literature, following/coexisting with the "Tolkien Subversion" era that was formed by Earthsea, Elric, The Black Company and other classics.

It was meant to be the first post in a whole series but I kind of got busy with other things... That being said I do want to make this post about one of the fascinating traits of the Tolkienesque Renaissance. A trait which seems to be overlooked or misunderstood today due to the very polarizing matter and the quick shifts occuring in our societies about this topic, but needs to be highlighted: the gender roles. Well more specifically the gender roles within the magic part of the fantasy world.

In 1985, Terry Pratchett created a talk/article which was forgotten for a given time, until it popped up on the Internet in the 2000s/2010s, and was more recently reprinted in book format (in posthumous anthologies of his talks, articles and essais) and even translated in other languages (the only French translation of this text dates from a few years ago). This text is called "Why Gandalf never married", and it is a very important mini-essay when it comes to the English-speaking fantasy literature because it highlighted very well (and in Pratchett's usual humoristic way) the gender "norms" within the Tolkien-model of fantasy ; but more importantly how this gendered system was carried on, consciously or unconsciously, by other authors in the fantasy genre.

I strongly suggest you go check out the original article, it is disponible for free on several websites, and I won't recap it here. But it made a point that many other analysists and historians of the fantasy genre relayed. The Tolkien model of the magic-use has magic lying within the hands of a men, and escaping the hands of women. In The Lord of the Rings the magic is the domain of the Wizards - which is an order of exclusively male entities. That's the Gandalf of the title. There is no female Wizard in the Tolkienesque world, and the closest thing we get to a female magic user within The Lord of the Rings is Galadriel - but Galadriel is in this specific plotline a secondary character with not as much importance or active power as the likes of Gandalf and Saruman, and she even denies herself that what she does is magic, carefully explaining that Elves merely consider what others call their "magic" advanced craft, technology and skills. Galadriel has the appearance of an enchantress, but in truth is not, and all the true magic relies within the male-only Gandalf.

And this model was carried on into a lot of the fantasy series and novels that followed the publication of The Lord of the Rings, even those that were created specifically to subvert the "Tolkienesque fantasy". In his article, Pratchett ranked alongside Gandalf as the celibate wizard-heroes of male dominance, Ged from Earthsea... by Ursula K. Le Guin, which is an author as far from woman-hating as the Sun is far from Pluto. And yet... Pratchett did point out that in the Earthsea series it is made extremely clear that only men can be true wizards, the "wizarding school" of this setting only teaches men, and when a woman has magical power, she is a secondary and weak witch with only a handful of simple abilities, unable to match any great "true" wizard. Even worse: when a woman actually shows some great talent and manages to challenge or outbeat the wizard... it is because she derives her power from malevolent sources and evil entities. It is true in Earthsea.

Or at least it was true. Indeed, we have to put things back in context: when Pratchett made this analysis, Earthsea was just a trilogy. Not just "a" trilogy, but rather a halted series: Le Guin had written the first three Earthsea books, and she wanted to return to writing more Earthsea but in her own words something felt wrong, she didn't find how to go on, she sense there was a problem with Earthsea though she could not identify what exactly... This is part of why the fourth book of the series was released 18 YEARS after the third. And the exact reason Le Guin was weirded out by her own series is precisely what Pratchett pointed out - and something Le Guin herself had to re-discover within her own work (Now I cannot claim that Pratchett's article actually helped Le Guin see this "gendered flaw" within her own novels, because I have no reliable source about Le Guin reading Pratchett's text or being aware of this talk - but given I heard it had quite an influence upon its release I do think it played a part in it). This is also why Le Guin returned to Earthsea by the late 80s: she had identified the problem in her own work, women were trapped in a gendered system denying them access to "true magic". And from "Tehanu" onward, she worked to - not correct - but improve this worldbuilding fact, for example by pointing out the inherent misogyny of her own world, by explaining the reasons that led to women being excluded of the art of magic, and by revealing that women and men are in fact equal in magic by nature but not by society.

[Note: I do wish to say that it is not an inherently bad or evil thing to have a "gendered" magic system within your fantasy work. The entire point of the fantasy is that you can do everything and anything and explore any possibility. You can have a magic system where only one gender can have magic ; you can have a magic system where spells are bound to a specific age ; you can have magic system where only rocks can perform magic because flesh cannot stand it - in itself, it is not a bad thing... The problem here that Pratchett denounced was how a specific gendered-model of magic bearing misogynistic traits within it was spreading around and becoming an untold law of the fantasy genre, to the point even feminist writers applied it without realizing it.]

Pratchett completed his trio of "male-dominated and somehow misogynistic" magic systems by adding to Gandalf and Ged the figure of Merlin from the Arthurian romances and epics, as one of the main cultural influences of magic within fantasy... but also one of the roots of the unconscious misogyny that was growing within fantasy. Because in the Arthurian world, not only is Merlin the most prominent wizard and enchanter, he is seen as the "source" and "true bearer" of magic, with the two famous Arthurian sorceresses, Viviane and Morgan, being explicitely his students - women learned magic from a man. And not only did they learned it from him, they both used it in a bad and negative way. Morgan to become a wicked witch and the enemy of the heroes ; Viviane to betray her own mentor and trap the wizard forever (with in many versions this being seen as a selfish action, some authors even pushing it as far as making Viviane one of the instruments of the Arthurian downfall). Of course there are very interesting talks, debates and analysis to have about this strange triangle of magic-users - especially since one of Merlin's gifts was prophecy and foresight, and it is implied that he knew what he was doing when he taught these women magic, somehow accepting that his lessons would be used against him and his work... But that's a talk for another day and it doesn't change how it influenced mid-20th century fantasy in a bad way.

As such, from Merlin to Ged passing by Gandalf, Pratchett made this conclusion: in English-speaking fantasy as it existed in the mid 80s, "true" wizards were men, and magic belonged to the male gender. And when a women practiced magic (if they could even practice magic), they were either depicted as weaker and inferior to men, either as evil antagonists corrupting magic or using it for nefarious purposes. Hence "Why Gandalf never married".

This talk is also very important to understand the very origins and building of Pratchett's own brilliant parody-deconstruction-reconstruction of the fantasy genre, his "Discworld" series. In his Discworld books Pratchett prepared several entire plotlines to explain, dissert and explore the gendered cliches and normative stereotypes of magic in fantasy, with the archetype of the male-magic through the Wizards and of the female-magic through the Witches. "Why Gandalf never married" was created in 1985... two years before Discworld's third book "Equal Rites", which is a brilliant parody of these same gender norms as a girl becomes fated to become a Wizard and fights for it, in a cloistered world where women can only hope to be Witches and nothing else.

Now, all of that being said, I return to my point about the Tolkienesque Renaissance. And I will claim that this "movement" actually inherited Pratchett's point or was conscious of it because, interestingly, all these revivals of the classical Tolkien-like fantasy worked very hard to break the gender norms of magic, and have prominent female magic users not depicted as evil. Mind you, they never went as far as Le Guin or Pratchett did in their own work, and in fact several of these works came to be criticized by later generations for being themselves too-gendered, too-cliche, or even misogynistic... However I do believe that it is important to highlight how these works, which might not fit our own modern gender equality or our modern view of women, still were a first step forward, a certain breakthrough, in a fantasy landscape where women were either denied magic or locked withn the "wicked witch" stereotype.

The Fionavar Tapestry series has one of the main female characters becoming The Seer, a benevolent and respected magic user. She is not of the same "type" as the wizards of the setting and lacks a magic as powerful as them, but is still an heroic supernatural character on which the story focuses. There is also an exploration of the gendered norm by having a Council of Mages from which women are lacking (and coming with historical explanations about the role of women in relationship to them) clashing with an all-female order of priestesses of a Great Goddess (a conflict which itself also is echoed by a gendered pantheon of Great Gods and Great Goddesses working in mysterious ways towards each other).

The Belgariad makes a clear effort by "doubling" the typical wizard-mentor into a duo, Belgarath the Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress, with Polgara being a powerful magic user equal in strength to Belgarath and working alongside him, but staying a benevolent and heroic character (though there is a dark side to her from her stern and harsh personality to a worldbuilding prophetic element about her possibly turning evil).

The Wheel of Time seems to avoid the topic entirely by completely reversing the norm: all magic-users are female, the male magic-users were all wiped out, and if they exist they have to be deprived of power else they will become evil. Now we still have a more nuanced approached in terms of moral since the Aes Sedai mix in one go the all-benevolent Gandalf-like figure with the manipulative and dreaded wicked witch - but the gender treatment and balance within "The Wheel of Time" has been debated and discussed a LOT so I won't go further into this.

Memory, Sorrow and Thorn literaly has a female Gandalf in the character of Geloë. There's still a bunch of evil witches throughout the series outgrowing in number the rare positive female magic users, but Geloë stands out as the big powerful helpful witch of the "hero's party".

As I said, these characters are of course not perfect. There are things to be said against them in a more modern light, or they might be judged as not good characters at all... But it doesn't change the fact that Geloë, Polgara and Moiraine are quite important in the history of fantasy as breakers of a system that was imposed by Merlin, Gandalf and Ged - and while they cannot answer the question of "Why Gandalf never married", they are proofs that "Gandalf can be a woman".

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team-magma-propaganda · 17 days

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#Team Magma Urgent Memo#

(high priority, internal use only).

Hello everyone. It pains me to have to do this type of damage control as it is wholly unprofessional and I fear it will leave others with the wrong impression of our organization, but nonetheless, it must be done.

On Thursday, April 11th, at approximately 7:24pm, a certain post went live on our social media page. I will not show it here nor repeat it in its full context for fear of giving the needless thing more attention, but suffice it to say it had little to do with our organization and its values. In fact, it seemed to be a deliberate smear on our values that would be put forth by the likes of Team Aqua. I am not ruling out the possibility that we may have been hacked, and I am working tirelessly with our cybersecurity team to determine if this was indeed the case. I highly suspect it was.

Rather than give that artless "meme" the light of day, I will instead use this wonderful opportunity to assert once again that despite what may be put out by Team Aqua and some particularly anti-intellectual folk in the press, Team Magma is an organization founded by and rooted in science. We care very deeply about the earth and its climate, as we need to maintain its delicate balance in order to sustain life, and yes, even to make leaps and bounds of progress in technology and agriculture as we aim to do. In fact, it is these very same scientific leaps that humanity has endeavored that are actively providing hope to the very real climate crisis occurring on this planet.

Team Magma is not anti-science. Team Magma is not against the climate, and is certainly not pro- "global warming." Do not believe anyone who says or posts otherwise. Team Magma works tirelessly day in and day out with the world's most renowned climate scientists, geologists, meteorologists, volcanologists, geochemists, regular chemists, biologists, archeologists, paleontologists, anthropologists, architects, linguists, herpetologists, ornithologists, neuroscientists, pokeologists, and more to ensure that, every single day, we are taking steps that will usher forward the world's most beautiful - and scientific - future.

Let us continue to march forward as an organization, hand in hand with knowledge and innovation, as we work to achieve this monumentous task.

-Dr. Maximilian Matsubusa, PhD

#team magma urgent memo #team magma maxie #maxie matsubusa #magma leader maxie

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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 months

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Tabs give me superpowers

Berliners: Otherland has added a second date (Jan 28) for my book-talk after the first one sold out - book now!

"Lifehacking" is in pretty bad odor these days, and with good reason: a once-useful catch-all for describing how to make things easier has become a pit of productivity porn, grifter hustling, and anodyne advice wreathed in superlatives and transformed into SEO-compliant listicles.

But I was there when lifehacking was born, and I'm here to tell you, it wasn't always thus. Lifehacking attained liftoff exactly 19 years and 348 days ago, on Feb 11, 2004, when Danny O'Brien presented "Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks" at the 0'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (aka ETCON). I was there, and I took notes:

https://craphound.com/lifehacksetcon04.txt

O'Brien's inspiration was his social circle, in which people he knew to be no smarter or better or motivated than anyone else in that group were somehow able to do much more than their peers, in some specific domain. O'Brien delved deeply into these peoples' lives and discovered that each of them had merely ("merely!") gotten very good at using one or two tools to automate things that would otherwise take up a lot of their time.

These "hacks" freed up their practitioners to focus on things that mattered more to them. They accomplished the goal set out in David Allen's Getting Things Done: to make a conscious choice about which things you are going to fail to do today, rather than defaulting to doing the things that are easy and trivial, at the expense of the things that matter, but are more complicated:

https://gettingthingsdone.com/what-is-gtd/

One trait all those lifehacks shared: everyone who created a little hack was faintly embarrassed by it, and assumed that others who learned about their tricks would find them trivial or foolish. O'Brien changed the world by showing that other people were, in fact, delighted and excited to learn about their peers' cool little tricks.

(Unfortunately, this eventually opened the floodgates of overheated posts about some miraculous hack that turned out to indeed be silly and trivial or even actively bad, but that wasn't O'Brien's fault!)

I'm one of those people whom others perceive as very "productive." There are some objective metrics on which this is true: I wrote nine books during lockdown, for example. Like the lifehackers O'Brien documented in 2004, I have lots of little hacks that aren't merely a way of getting more done – they're a way to make sure that I get the stuff that matters to me (taking care of my family and my health, and writing books) done.

A lot of these lifehacks boil down to making your life easier. There's a spot on our kitchen counter where I put e-waste. Whenever I go out to the car, I carry any e-waste out and put it in a bag in the trunk. Any time I'm near our city dump, I stop and throw the bag into their e-waste bin. This is now a habit, and habits are things you get for free: I spend zero time thinking about e-waste, which means I have more time to think about things that matter (and our e-waste still ends up in the right place).

There's other ways I use habits to make my life easier: after many years, I learned how to write every day:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/22/walking-the-plank/

For longer-form works like novels, I "leave myself a rough edge," finishing the day's work in the middle of a sentence. That way I get a few words for free the next day, meaning I never start the day's work wondering which words I'll type:

https://locusmag.com/2014/01/cory-doctorow-cheap-writing-tricks/

One of the most powerful habits I've cultivated is to have a group of daily tabs that I open in a new browser every morning. The meat of this tab group is websites I want to check in with every day, either because they don't have RSS feeds, or because I want to make sure I never miss an update.

This tab-group habit started before RSS was widespread, when most of the websites I wanted to check in on every day didn't have feeds yet, and for many years, this group was just a set of daily reads. But over the years, I started throwing things in the tab-group that I needed to stay on top of.

My daily tabs are in a folder called "unfucked rota" (they were originally in a folder called "rota," which got corrupted and had to be reconstructed in a folder I called "fucked rota," until I finally took a couple hours off and got it in good running order, hence "unfucked rota"). As I type this, "unfucked rota" contains more than a hundred websites I visit every morning, but it also contains:

The edit-history pages for four Wikipedia entries I'm watching;

Chronological feeds of my books on Amazon and Audible, to catch counterfeits as they are posted;

The parent notification portal for my kid's school;

The mileage history for the airline I flew on yesterday (I'll delete this once the flight is posted);

The credit card history for a card I reported a fraudulent charge on (I'll delete this once the refund is posted);

The sell-pages for three products that are out of stock (I'll delete these once the products are in stock and ordered);

A bookmarked newest-first Ebay search for a shirt I like that has been discontinued by the manufacturer;

The new-survey-completed pages for my last two Kickstarters;

The courier tracking page for an item being shipped sea-freight to me from Asia.

The tail end of this unfucked rota changes all the time, but as you can tell, it's got a lot of stuff that would be time-consuming to build a whole new system to track, but which has a web-page that can be easily added to a daily, habitual check-in and then removed when it's not relevant anymore.

Some of these things have email notifiers or RSS feeds, but those are too easy to lose in the noise. I generally delete email from ecommerce sites unread, since 99.99% of the messages they send me are unsolicited marketing nonsense, not the "notify me when this is back in stock" message I do want to see (same goes for my kid's school, which sends me fifty unimportant messages for every message that I must reply to).

Most of the internet is still on the web, which means it can be bookmarked, which means that it takes me one second to add it to the group of things I'm staying on top of, and one second to remove from that group. I get up in the morning, middle-click the "unfucked rota" item in my bookmarks pane, make a cup of coffee, and then sit down and race through those tabs, close-close-close.

It takes less than a second to scan a tab to see if it's changed (and if I close a tab too quickly, the ctrl-shift-T "unclose" shortcut is there in muscle-memory, another habit). The whole process takes between one and 15 minutes (depending on whether there's anything useful and new in one of those tabs).

Tabs, like lifehacks, are also in bad odor. Everyone stresses about how many tabs they have open. It's even inspired Rusty Foster's excellent newsletter, Today In Tabs:

https://www.todayintabs.com/

But this is a very different way to think about tabs. Rather than opening a window full of tabs that need your detailed, once-off attention later, this method is about using groups of tabs so that you can pay cursory, frequent attention to them.

In a world full of administrative burdens, where firms and institutions play the "sure, we'll do that, but you're going to have to track our progress" game to get out of living up to their obligations, this method is a powerful countermeasure:

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/02/02/david-graebers-the-utopia-of-rules-on-technology-stupidity-and-the-secret-joys-of-bureaucracy/

My little tab habit is so incredibly useful, such a powerful way to seize back time and power from powerful actors who impose burdens on me, that I sometimes forget how, for other people, tabs are a symptom of a life that's spiraling out of control. For me, a couple hundred tabs are a symbol of a couple hundred tasks that I'm totally on top of, a symbol of control wrestled back from others who are hostile to my interests.

This isn't how tabs were "meant" to be used, of course. It's an example of the kind of "innovation" that comes from users repurposing things in ways their designers didn't necessarily anticipate or intend.

This is what Jonathan Zittrain meant by "generative" technology back in 2008, when he published his incredibly prescient The Future of the Internet: And How To Stop It:

https://memex.craphound.com/2008/07/22/zittrains-the-future-of-the-internet-how-to-save-the-internet-from-the-internet/

For Zittrain, "generativity" was the property of some technologies that let its users generate new, useful tools and solutions for themselves (this is very different from "generative AI!")

Zittrain described how "curated" computing systems, like mobile devices that relied on apps that couldn't be adapted by their users, were dead ends for generativity. 15 years later, the dismal world of apps has proven him right:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/24/everything-not-mandatory/#is-prohibited

To the extent that "lifehacking" is about doing more, rather than being more deliberate about what you accomplish, it can be harmful. I am not immune to the failure modes of lifehacking:

https://locusmag.com/2017/11/cory-doctorow-how-to-do-everything-lifehacking-considered-harmful/

But overall, using tabs as something I close, rather than something I open, is a source of comfort and calm for me. For one thing, ripping through a group of tabs every morning means that I don't have to worry about missing something if I go too fast. I'll get another chance tomorrow:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/27/probably/

Decades ago, Dori Smith dubbed her pioneering blog her "#Backup Brain":

https://web.archive.org/web/20020120231027/http://www.backupbrain.com/

At their best, our systems – be they physical, like a spot on the counter where the e-waste goes, or digital, like a tab-group – are "congitive prostheses." They allow us to move important things from the highly contested, busy and precious space between our ears and out there into the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

Like those lifehackers that O'Brien studied for his presentation in 2004, I confess to feeling a little silly about telling you all about this. For me, this habit of decades is so ingrained that it feels trivial and obvious. And yet, when I look at people in my life struggling to stay on top of a million nagging administrative tasks that could be easily watched through a morning's flick through a tab-group, I can't help but think that maybe some of you will find a useful idea or two in my unfucked rota.

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/25/today-in-tabs/#unfucked-rota

#pluralistic #productivity #life hacks #mozilla #firefox #open web #systems #getting things done #externalized memory #outboard brain #generativitiy

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roxannepolice · 2 months

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This may be stretching the concept of work's intent and possibly conflating it with reader's intent, but I think if you scratch to the absolute bottom of chameleon arch in s3 the ultimate difference between the Doctor and the Master becomes being people oriented vs. goal oriented. Like, if you go beyond the question of "could the Doctor have been something of a bad person* and the Master a good person", and ask "under what circumstances would they be like this", it looks like the Doctor - or, what aside from a body (with all its mind-indepented memories) was left of them in John Smith - was. well. being oriented towards people around him. And. that's what had One go from crotchety man willing to kill over his secrets or even a freaking lighter into the Doctor that is. Meeting all those wonderful companions, starting from Ian and Barbara that would just tell him fuck off you're crossing a line and I will not have it. And no, I don't think it's a matter of "wanting to be liked", but rather seeing "oh my Omega, I actually hurt this person". And in the main story that worked out for good, and in fact I would say that when it comes to "origins of morality" and "how to live" questions, that is the more reliable way to go! But when that same mindset is surrounded by all the bigotry - as well as just living a nice life as it is provided to you! - of edwardian era, it results in... well, obviously, the way to deal with those evil guys is to FITE! and this is what all those teenage boys have been trained to do, should the need call (ah, the hanging cloud of knowledge a need will in fact call them so soon in this two-parter...)! And this... competent. but ultimately underdeveloped through no fault of her own maid needs to just have the distinction between fiction and reality explained to her, the poor thing probably thinks the invention of writing is only to be used for things that are absolutely true... Yeah, punch him.

I use the term "goal-oriented" for the Master, but I suppose I should clarify, because we all know that if it was pure goal-orientation, then there are infinitely easier ways to take over the world that *checks notes* man-eating sofas. Yes, the Master is absolutely into over-convoluted plans to the point where they become a goal in itself. But what I mean is, no, they can't just hang around seeing the universe, they need a goal to achieve, there has to be a point to all this, and survival and power are arguably the two most basic goals there can be, once you scratch happiness as a bit too indefinite. And obviously, that's the exact opposite of "how to live". In many ways its a much more animalistic and base motivation than anything a conscious mind might want. Kind of existence vs. life distinction. BUT? In those last few decades of universe's existence??? Where there is literally no other goal left than survival? Not necessarily your own survival, but rather survival as an abstract concept, survival of ANYTHING? That mindset, combined with brains, makes you the most wonderful person that could possibly be! You're there, doggedly pursuing the only goal left in the universe, putting all of the resources you have left, MAKING ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY OUT OF FREAKING FOOD, and if anyone has any shot at surviving it is indeed thanks to you! There are two apparent contradiction to this (as of course there have to be in a story that's honest and not just making a point). The first is Yana keeping up the hopes of other people even while knowing it's likely false, and the second is him being willing to sacrifice himself so others will reach Utopia. But if you think about it. Both of these things are, in a way, utilitarian. Yes, hope is often framed as the ultimate irrational ideal, but once it's gone from everyone else, then... what is there to do? That's the end to the only goal left. So long as others hope you can get them out, you can go on tinkering just in bloody case. And while giving up your life for others tends to be framed as the ultimate act of good... there's a level at which Yana just freaking calucates himself as the easiest to expend. He's old and tired. The people who managed to reach the silo are either children or young and strong, there's a lot ahead of them. This is cynical and absolutely not the perspective to hold. But. at the end of the universe. This cynicism leads to sacrifice.

THAT IS NOT SAY YANA ISN'T JUST PLAIN NICE AND SHOWING MORE CONSIDERATION FOR OTHER'S FEELINGS THAN THE MASTER IN ANY FORMAT EVER DID! But I suppose when you're goal-oriented and everyone around you literally has no other goals than yours... why not just be kind** indeed?

Yes, there's a great tensimm fanfic about this:

*I admit I think one of the most interesting aspects of John Smith was precisely making him not a good person but hardly the worst man there ever was maybe it's because I've read edwardian era books that makes me think his paternalisation of Martha really wasn't the worst way for a white man to treat a poc even without outright violence. But if he was a really good person then that would just tell you making him give up his existence was bad because he's a good person whereas as it is the question is what makes the subjectively real existence of this particular not very good but not really worse than millions of people like him man that devloped subjectively very real bonds with others more expendable than any other's?

** Gosh my mixed feeling for Twelve, like I love him, he's up there with 2,3,4 and 10 as character-defining for me, but why just why have him always turn out to be ultimately right about his absolute morals, he's kind of the antithesis to time lord victorious, so long as you do the kind thing then there's always an unforeseen ex machina to prove you right, you'll never fuck up REAL bad, a real dilemma is not between making the choice that's subjectively or objectively good, it's between two objectively bad choices once again Simm!Master fell where he stood no less than Twelve.

#doctor who #meta #doctor who meta #dw meta #the doctor #the master #tenth doctor #john smith #jacobi!master #professor yana #doctor who human nature/family of blood #doctor who utopia #philosophy in doctor who

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nicolovespancakes · 2 months

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Speaking on more characters that remind me of Our toymaker, this one shares a name with him.

****SPOILERS FOR THE DR. WHO SPECIAL, "THE GIGGLE"****

From his Wiki directly:

- "The Toymaker, also known as the Celestial Toymaker, was a powerful being who ensnared sentient beings in seemingly childish games, with their freedom as the stakes. However, the Toymaker hated to lose and the games were always rigged in his favour."

"• According to the Sixth Doctor, "nobody [knew]" who the Toymaker really was. He was said to be "old beyond imagining" and to predate "Time Lord records". The team of modern Gallifreyan researchers who later attempted to "chart his path through Time" gave up, bored of all the games he played with his own past. The Doctor speculated that they didn't try any harder than that because they couldn't find a way to control him.

Indeed, one account showed the Toymaker acknowledging different origins in conversation with Adric and with the Doctor, once even altering the details of his story mid-conversation.

The Toymaker had lived for "millions of years". He then seemed to bear his soul to the doctor, and told him that for the first few "thousands of millennia" he spent in the Doctor's universe, he used his powers to build and assist civilisations — creating "ships, continents, whole planets even". However, he eventually got bored, until only mindless destruction could give him any satisfaction at all; after an equal length of time spent destroying everything he had previously built up, he discovered games as his final and lasting distraction, as they allowed him to embrance nihilism without falling into inactive apathy, surrendering all to the whims of chance.

One source saw the Fourteenth Doctor describe the Toymaker as an "elemental force" with "the power of a god", and suggested that he originated outside the universe; he described the Toymaker's domain as "another realm, a hollow beneath the Under-Universe"."

"• Creating the Celestial Toyroom

According to the First Doctor, the Toymaker succeeded in creating a universe of his own, "entirely in his own vision" called the Celestial Toyroom, where he would "manipulate people and turn them into his playthings". The Toymaker and his games became "notorious throughout the universe" as he spread his influence to attract people into his world and try to make them part of it."

"- By then, the Toymaker had adopted a new appearance, a tall, blond-haired man who affected a variety of outfits and accents.

Running amok, the Toymaker played games with players across the universe, including the Guardians of Time and Space, whom he turned into voodoo dolls, and "God", whom he turned into a jack-in-the-box after gambling with Him. He would go on to claim to have "made a jigsaw out of [the Doctor's] history", a claim which shocked the Fourteenth Doctor.

The Master "begged for his life with one final game", but he lost, whereupon the Toymaker imprisoned him inside his gold tooth "for all eternity". The only person the Toymaker avoided playing against was an entity he called "the One Who Waits", claiming to have "seen it hiding" and simply run away."

"- The Toymaker settled on Earth due to believing it and humanity were the "ultimate playground". In 1925, he set up a toy store and manipulated events which resulted in one of his dolls, Stooky Bill, becoming the first image viewed on a television screen. He also trapped Charles Banerjee in his domain after the latter lost a game with him, turning him partially into a doll. The Toymaker animated and immortalised the sound of Stooky Bill's laugh to spread insanity in the 21st century, as by then technology and communication had reached a point where the giggle could be heard subliminally across all screens across the planet.

The Toymaker soon met the Fourteenth Doctor and Donna Noble, luring them into his domain. He taunted the Doctor with the number of people who had died because of him over the years, which enraged the Doctor enough to challenge him to a game of Cut with his personal cards. The Toymaker won, however, he was stopped from claiming his prize when the Doctor pointed out that, as he had beaten the Toymaker once before, this only counted as one-all in a best of three match. The Toymaker then swiftly disappeared to 2023, crumpling his toyshop into a box, with the Doctor and Donna in hot pursuit.

The Toymaker arrived at UNIT HQ, entirely unthreatened by UNIT as he danced and lip-synced whilst slaughtering anybody who attempted to stop him."

"- Though "wily", he denied that he would cheat in his games, seeming genuinely offended by the suggestion. While the Fourteenth Doctor confirmed it was "the one thing he won't do" as "the rules of the game" were the only rules he would follow, the Toymaker would try to work outside the rules, such as trying to best the Doctor in a game of catch by throwing the ball without warning to catch the Doctor off-guard."

"- Within the Celestial Toyroom, the Toymaker commanded immense powers, but they were limited by the rules he or his opponents set for any particular game. The Fourteenth Doctor stated the Toymaker was bound by the rules, so much so that he could not cheat to win, even if he wanted to. He also had to follow new rules he brought into the game, even if the new rule did not gain him the result he was expecting, like how his desire to face the Fifteenth Doctor accidentally meant he also had to face the Fourteenth Doctor at the same time. Although, he could bend these rules or "forget" to mention them to his opponents if he so chose, although he was not above cheating if his opponent did also; on one occasion, he tauntingly claimed that he was just following a "new rule" his opponent had unwitingly introduced by cheating."

Or how about his changes in appearance or fashion sense?

-"Appearance

In the form encountered by the Fourteenth Doctor, the Toymaker appeared as a blond man. He wore a number of different outfits based on his whims and the current situation. When first met in 2023 he wore a black top hat, tailcoat and trousers with an alabaster bow tie and waistcoat as well as a plain white shirt. His outfit in 1925 were made up of a caramel brown leather apron, a single-breasted waistcoat of plum and sapphire tartan with a fob watch, a white and ebony pinstripe shirt, tan trousers, and white and brown spectator shoes. He also wore a shako and frock coat in scarlet and ivory with gold trims, beige breeches and ebony black boots with crimson laces when he terrorized UNIT, and then a black leather jacket with a khaki uniform and an ivory scarf as well as goggles when he took control of the galvanic beam; both events in London during 2023."

Or the way he talks?

"This body is being sustained by him. Me. Whatever. Here, let me explain. I needed a body — sadly, my original one did not… suit this universe. Your friend's is the first I have come across that isn't enfeebled and prone to wearing out every seventy years. Mortality is such a burden, I find. This one could last a good thousand years, I should imagine. (…) I think there is a tiny spark of him somewhere inside me, acting as a cohesion to keep this frame together."

"I came to this universe with such delight. And I played them all, Doctor. I toyed with supernovas, turned galaxies into spin tops. I gambled with God and made him a jack-in-the-box."

"Do you like my puppets, Doctor? Do you like my fun? All of them have played and lost, but here's my favourite one." - THE TOYMAKER TAUNTING THE DOCTOR WITH A PUPPET THAT RESEMBLES HIM.

"You know full well this is merely a face concealing a vastness that will never cease, because your good and bad are nothing to me. All that exists is to win or lose."

"I have fallen in love with humanity. This world is the ultimate playground! All of the sport, the matches, the medals, the gambling, and the anger... And the children shackled to their bedrooms with their joysticks and their buttons. You make games out of bricks falling upon other bricks. You are exceptional! And then there are the mind-games, oh... the dating and ghosting, the deceit and the control, you make me dizzy! I am in no hurry to leave this place."

"I can not die. If this shop contracts into oblivion, do you know what would happen to me? Nothing. Nothing at all. A brief interlude of silence, and then I return. Different, perhaps, a new face, voice, personality, it all depends on how bored I am of this - the essence remains."

IS THIS NOT JASON THE TOYMAKER SPEAK? DOES HE NOT SPEAK LIKE THAT?

_______________________________

This yet again came up in reference to similar demeanors, and a musical number!

You really should watch this one if you haven't, it's so fucking entertainingly funny.

https://youtu.be/hGxcTWLXAa0?si=soKDIz4xy5gVL7FT

AND ITS NEIL PATRICK HARRIS.

Anyway.

From the way he acts there, The Toymaker already presents a similar style to one such as Jason.

And a similar, mocking, cocky personality.

I love it.

"There is order, and chaos… and there is play.”

Edit: This video is also very good on example of a serious demeanor for both The Celestial Toymaker and Jason. It's where some of the quotes in the post come from.

Have a look if you like.

https://youtu.be/DXDuuiBvMGU?si=Gtgutd2FzgSy_gpd

ANOTHER EDIT: The opening scene to this episode is also, very Jason-esk. Uncanny, a bir eerie. Creepy, maybe? ;) I love the vibes. It also shows a bit of the toyshop, reminds me a LOT of Jason's own. Not to mention the way the Celestial Toymaker talks is very reminiscent to Jason, like I said.

youtube

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