this is how i cope

won’t you indulge him?

Volume 4 of Mythological Minison is waiting for your submissions! Submit your form poetry and myth-y visual art here: https://theminisonproject.com/theminisonzine/zinesubmissions/ #mythologicalminison #theminisonzine #mythology

devastating: this user saw a younger gortash mod and thats gonna be his whole day now

being a snob in the privacy of your own home is so important actually

I don’t know what this is called (I continue not to know anything about literature I’m sorry) but MMMMMM THE SHAPE OF THE WORDS

The thing no one tells you about switching from writing sapphic romance in first person to writing sapphic romance in third person is that you Will encounter the Gay Fanfic Pronoun Problem and you Will be unaccustomed to dealing with it

//So that essay I did. I ended up writing VERY VERY thinly veiled DOD fanfiction for the prompt which was basically “Write a first-person initiation into adulthood based off one of the stories in the textbook and a comparative essay between the two after” and so I ended up bullshitting the essay only reading the stories after I made the narrative lol i got a 96/100 anyways //I figured as it was about everyone’s favourite bilf of the bog that I’d post it here, but... //Reminder: This is my first time really solidly writing in first person since I was like nine, so it may be a bit rocky. First person is NOT my area of expertise lol //And ofc obvious trigger warnings for mentions of paedophilia and stuff (Nothing explicit though, of course!) //Enjoy!

“...And we’ll be married. You’ll see.” “I never saw you speak to each other.” “I said, you’ll see.”

So the banter had gone by so frequently then, and now stood I alongside his wife and his child, and mother on the other side, staring at the curves of his face and how it had thinned, still soft and child-like yet aged and grown in such a way none could have explained by any normal means. Perhaps, then, it was in the sight of those definitively unchanging eyes and how they gleamed the same way under the sun that had caught my attention, and in turn, his, and he turned to look back with some strange sadness that I had averted my gaze in some feeling between either abashedness or fear of any hint of understanding to be held. “...Why her?” “Her? Leonard, look at her.” “I do see her.” “Don’t you? You hardly even looked. Well…” “She… Is kind, isn’t she?” “Yes! And one day, I will make her my bride.” And so the village men had gone and lined up near the forest break on the army’s cart, the showing of the backs of their unnaturally cut hair settling an odd knot in the stomachs of I and who I was certain, the other few men who stayed behind. Orbas’s hair had been a similar length of the day I met him, so I had recalled, though the ends were splayed and framed that once pale neck in such a way that reminded me of the small leaves of a flaxen bush or perhaps a spring tree, though there was one small, favorite piece that strayed off the side of his face — His son, such a small child, had already inherited it — And so he had frequently kept tied and twined with the same strip of leather worn by men and women here. For Orbas, it was no more. I had thought to pick up his son at that moment; for his sake, his father’s sake, and as well my own. Near four and almost the same image as his father, that I had at times troubled myself in remembering his mother, and to see and grant his father’s own personal wishes of caring for that stray hair in his place (So as I had when we were mere boys), tying the silk strands in place, to have “him” so completely and totally reliant on me, it was comforting. The feel of the warmth from such a small body, held in my arms and placed against my own, the grip of small hands pulling against my cloak, was comforting. It was wish fulfillment, in a way. The circumstances in which we had met were entirely on Orbas’s own will. How he darted so confidently up to the smithing corner with frail legs that seemed ready to snap under his own weight, and I, feeble and feminine in mind as he was in body, having apparently gained some semblance leaning towards haughty self-bravado thought, ‘What does this mad fool think he’s doing? Who does he think he is?’ and was only further driven in such convictions when he spoke as if we had never once been strangers before. For Orbas, all it took was a single conversation —  And still, for all the good I’ve come to speak and feel for him, I think not once have I changed in my belief that he was completely mad that day in having tossed all pride aside to speak to the mollified mute of Atheren. 

He had dragged me from my crafts, introduced me to friends who would soon become my own, and had not once ceased for a day after to visit me in my practice there. Father was pleased at first, until he wasn’t, as I had gone from smithing and not speaking to speaking and not smithing, and following his harsh, booming rebuke towards the shaken lad as I could only offer my embarrassed gaze lowered towards the dirt, and bits of green with hints of metal in-between, he would come every other day instead. When we went out, with others or by ourselves as we later had, it had always been Orbas there to lead the way, the conversation, to give directions and warnings unless I knew better in my caution, to where I would try to speak — But I was merely a follower. I have always been, a fact with no shame in admitting and a fate I would think to show no more than indifferent contentment towards. “Why me?” I had asked. Another walk. “We never spoke before.” “Can you keep a secret?” I nodded. Something in my heart fluttered and leapt with those words. “Well… Haven’t you seen yourself?” Something must have been spoken in my silence as confusion or hurt in a way he didn’t need to look over his shoulder to see, prompting him to explain. “You never spoke to the adults or children your age, but only the animals and infants lost by their mothers. You panicked, but always found them home. We saw it. We all did, then, you know.” “...” “When you saw a fly being eaten by a spider, you would take a stick to it and try to ward it off. If you couldn’t reach, you’d find somewhere else to go that you didn’t have to hear it. Your father yelled at you because you had trouble baiting a fish hook. Other children… Normal boys, at least, we saw it and laughed. You, already bigger than the rest of us and yet hardly able to look anyone in the eyes. The girls fancied it, though, called you a gentleman and all, and so one day I thought, ‘I wonder if there’s someone he’s trying to impress with all this?’ and I began to get curious.” “No. I… I’m not trying to impress anyone.” “Well you certainly are when you follow every stupid order I give you.” I stared at the back of his head. A few more steps, and he peered over his shoulder at me, whatever look I wore causing those soft lips to curl up into a laugh. “There has to be someone.” “... There isn’t, honest.” “Say who. We can help you, Leonard, and you’re set to be wed before any of us. Haven’t you always spoken about wanting children? Yours and mine can be friends, and your sons will be older and teach my sons all about everything, just like us!” Something in those words had risen and tightened the back of my throat, and I spoke as I did back then, before I met him — Unable to look him in the eye, look at him at all, and my voice had grown so faint the sound had barely reached my own ears. “It is a secret. That is all.” … And as the years passed, that secret and I grew up and spent our years together, the “Secret” got married at fifteen, and I was sixteen, except he had grown out of being a “Secret”, and once I did, I thought to myself, “I am free” —  But I never did find a wife. When the friends of my childhood pointed them out, “That one’s pretty”, “I spoke to her, she is interested in you”, I only could only ever offer another soulless nod along to the increasingly agitated and growing band of married men, all who later had their sons I loved and adored just as I would have my own, and some had daughters, too. In that same year Orbas had gotten married, I moved on to another secret picking berries in the woods, another fixation skinning their knee on the ground, but after him, I never knew it as I did then — “Such a thing would be impossible,” I always told myself — And I continued life as a blacksmith’s son, a follower, and a coward to the war that brought itself to our town in search of new hands for slaughter. “Security” had been the word spoken to me that day, who chose to stay behind (The child incapable of baiting a fish hook or accepting nature in near all its form), in contrast to him, whose bravery sought the peace of the world, the heads of red-eyed monsters, all the glory and fame reflected back the small village of Atheren, even at risk of his own family, foraged and built. A family, one woman and her four year-old son, unable to fend for themselves. Once again he acted in a way that any madman might, entrusting his sole unmarried friend to care for a wife and son in his absence, and then again, perhaps not mad — Explicitly had he stated his trust with a laugh in that I had come “This far” without any luck, and furthermore went to cite our own, personal trust we had built in each other — He knew they would be fine because he simply knew me. Always the protector, and where I never did find a wife, I made my home among the children of the village. And as the cart started away through the woods with a forward jerk, and Obros, the sweetness grown out of his face, looked over his shoulder at me, his tiny son held in my arms, and smiled with that worried look, I smiled back. I gave him a nod in reassurance, and he slipped through that canopy of pine and birch and away towards war beyond. It’s alright now. Now, I am fine. He’ll be alright. He’ll be alright. It’s okay, because now, I’ve finally found someone. Someone I love, just as I loved you. It was a secret.

[Image ID: a The Magnus Archives comic in scales of greens, illustrating a moment from episode 129

The first three panels are close-ups of Jon.

Panel 1. Jon has a hand behind his head and is looking up, he has an expression of annoyance and embarassment on his face. He says "God knows what. and i can't talk to Melanie.

I suppose" and stops talking abruptly.

Panel 2. Jon lets his hand fall down his neck and looks to the side in embarassement, he makes an unintelligible sound.

Panel 3. Jon lets his arm fall down and looks Martin in the eyes, he has a sad and earnest look on his face. he says "I miss you"

The central panel is a medium shot of Martin and Jon.

Panel 4. Martin and Jon are facing each other, Martin is holding some files and has a look of disbelief on his face. he lets out a small laugh and says "Really?" Jon looks up at him with a sad expression and blushed cheeks.

The next two panels, in the corners of the page, are close-ups of Jon on the right and Martin on the left.

Panel 5. Jon looks up at martin with a look of surrender and yearning and a deeper blush. He says "yeah"

Panel 6. Martin looks down at Jon with a surprised face. realising he was actually being honest. He thinks "oh." /.End]

still trying to figure out my designs for these two but after listening to MAG 129 the worms in my brain took over

i'm vv new to tma but i sense an hyperfixation coming

been reading @avidcollectorofdust ‘s totk tbib au with a certain flashy dramatic sword spirit and could not keep myself from drawing him 🤍

Click click goes The weaving loom. "Click Click Goes the Loom" by Regina Jade, pdf pg. 10 Check out the minison zine archives to read more from Issue 12: https://theminisonproject.com/theminisonzine/tmzarchive/ #theminisonzine #TheMinisonProject #poetry

it's fascinating to me the way that different social media platforms result in different types of fandom behavior. while s5 of tma was airing, I spent a good amount of time on tma tiktok (I log back in about once every two months now, going back to in-person school after a year a half of lockdown seem to re-blanace my brain and made me once again not really enjoy the format) while still using tumblr as my main socmed, and while there was a lot of overlap in the fan culture, some things were notably different.

tumblr tma fans had near-encyclopedic knowledge of the source material, but it was kind of an ongoing joke for tiktok tma fans that everyone binged the whole show in a week-long fugue state and lost memory of about 35% of it. tumblr has virtually no character limit and allows posts to be passed around by users indefinitely, which lends itself to fairly in-depth meta analysis being made and shared until most any fan could say "the time and space discrepancies at hill top road? psh yeah, I know all about them, I've read seven scrupulously cited posts that lay out all the details." for the entire time that s5 was airing, tiktok videos could still only be a minute long, and I know from a lot of personal effort that there's only so much you can fit into a one minute script that you also have to memorize and record (and cc manually with tiktok text stickers, as they didn't add the caption feature until april 2021) if you want the process to take less than four hours of your one mortal human life. and then you only see the video if your following or fyp algorithm shows it to you. there were a few tma meta-ish videos that got popular because other people would make their own videos referencing them and tag the account so their followers could see what they were talking about, but it's much harder to circulate content you like there. several times I saw people post videos saying "I got into cosplay to film some [agnes or annabelle or gerry or another secondary character] and I just realized I have no idea what their deal actually is 💀".

a thing that tiktok tma fandom was definitely better at than tumblr tma fandom was accurately remembering certain pieces of characterization and the flow of certain scenes. I've seen a bunch of posts on here where someone is trying to argue a point with excerpts from the text ("x character is nicer than you all give them credit for" "x character is so mean to y character in this scene" "z theory can't be true because y character said a line that disproves it") where the argument only holds up because the poster has gotten these excerpts from a transcript dive and hasn't listened to the episodes they're from recently, because while the text alone can be construed to mean one thing, the way it's delivered on-podcast clearly intends another. tiktok, being an audio and video based medium, allows audio clips to be shared around a lot, and cosplayers would often all make videos acting along to the same show clips of juicy interpersonal drama, and so tiktok fans, though they may have had less overall memory of what characters said, always had a better grasp on how they said it. an average tiktok tma fan might not have remembered melanie's subplot about war ghosts, but they would know the nuances of how the way she talks to jon changes between mag 28 and mag 155.

Your discussions on AI art have been really interesting and changed my mind on it quite a bit, so thank you for that! I don’t think I’m interested in using it, but I feel much less threatened by it in the same way. That being said, I was wondering, how you felt about AI generated creative writing: not, like AI writing in the context of garbage listicles or academic essays, but like, people who generate short stories and then submit them to contests. Do you think it’s the same sort of situation as AI art? Do you think there’s a difference in ChatGPT vs mid journey? Legitimate curiosity here! I don’t quite have an opinion on this in the same way, and I’ve seen v little from folks about creative writing in particular vs generated academic essays/articles

i think that ai generated writing is also indisputably writing but it is mostly really really fucking awful writing for the same reason that most ai art is not good art -- that the large training sets and low 'temperature' of commercially available/mass market models mean that anything produced will be the most generic version of itself. i also think that narrative writing is very very poorly suited to LLM generation because it generally requires very basic internal logic which LLMs are famously bad at (i imagine you'd have similar problems trying to create something visual like a comic that requires consistent character or location design rather than the singular images that AI art is mostly used for). i think it's going to be a very long time before we see anything good long-form from an LLM, especially because it's just not a priority for the people making them.

ultimately though i think you could absolutely do some really cool stuff with AI generated text if you had a tighter training set and let it get a bit wild with it. i've really enjoyed a lot of AI writing for being funny, especially when it was being done with tools like botnik that involve more human curation but still have the ability to completely blindside you with choices -- i unironically think the botnik collegehumour sketch is funnier than anything human-written on the channel. & i think that means it could reliably be used, with similar levels of curation, to make some stuff that feels alien, or unsettling, or etheral, or horrifying, because those are somewhat adjacent to the surreal humour i think it excels at. i could absolutely see it being used in workflows -- one of my friends told me recently, essentially, "if i'm stuck with writer's block, i ask chatgpt what should happen next, it gives me a horrible idea, and i immediately think 'that's shit, and i can do much better' and start writing again" -- which is both very funny but i think presents a great use case as a 'rubber duck'.

but yea i think that if there's anything good to be found in AI-written fiction or poetry it's not going to come from chatGPT specifically, it's going to come from some locally hosted GPT model trained on a curated set of influences -- and will have to either be kind of incoherent or heavily curated into coherence.

that said the submission of AI-written stories to short story mags & such fucking blows -- not because it's "not writing" but because it's just bad writing that's very very easy to produce (as in, 'just tell chatGPT 'write a short story'-easy) -- which ofc isn't bad in and of itself but means that the already existing phenomenon of people cynically submitting awful garbage to literary mags that doesn't even meet the submission guidelines has been magnified immensely and editors are finding it hard to keep up. i think part of believing that generative writing and art are legitimate mediums is also believing they are and should be treated as though they are separate mediums -- i don't think that there's no skill in these disciplines (like, if someone managed to make writing with chatGPT that wasnt unreadably bad, i would be very fucking impressed!) but they're deeply different skills to the traditional artforms and so imo should be in general judged, presented, published etc. separately.

Things of Note at @neil-gaiman ‘s NJPAC talk:

1. Do you people understand that he switches into accents when he reads? Do you people know he does a perfect Michael Sheen impression? did you know it’s also hot

2. He used to cold call publishers/mags to see if they’d publish his work. He’d lie when asked what other magazines he wrote for; they’d think he was more legitimate and would, therefore, be more likely to take him on themselves. “You couldn’t get away with that now” thanks to Google. Also, back then, “we had telephones and we used them,” but today’s publishers would not easily recover if you unexpectedly called them on the phone.

3. It was a personal point of pride for Neil to write for each of the magazines he’d claimed to have written for. He said “I didn’t lie. I was chronologically challenged.”

4. Neil made a deliberate effort to not be boxed in by publishers. He’d interviewed many authors who were unhappily boxed and did everything he could to avoid it, including declining big contracts from prestigious publishers (notably after American Gods). This is why he can write what he likes now. Comics writing spoiled him in this regard, as publishers mistook the medium for a genre, and therefore didn’t care what he wrote (so he wrote all the genres he wanted to in Sandman).

5. He hates Thomas Hardy thanks to being introduced to him in school. Regarding being forced to read Tess of the D’urbervilles, he said “I wouldn’t do that to a dog”. He hopes students, who might have liked him if they found him on their own, don’t encounter his work in school and hate him for it.

6. “The evil characters (you write) don’t possess you, you try to find the little bit of you in them….the little bit of you that is gloriously evil.”

7. “I touched the magic and passed it along” this was a line from Watching from the Shadows that especially moved me.

8. Terry was increasingly upset as the bidding on Good Omens increased (eventually reaching 150,000 - can’t remember if he said $ or £). For his part, when the book finally sold, Neil put on Iggy Pop’s Success and danced.

9. Anansi Boys should be out on Prime by the end of 2024!

10. Described Sandalphon as someone you want to “hit with a large oar”. (The woman next to me, who was extremely stingy with her applause, hooted like an owl at this and clapped til the last).

11. Pronounces Amazon as “Ama-zin” and Los Angeles as “Los Angelese”. This isn’t noteworthy, but I liked it enough to write it down.

12. “Being on a beach in bare feet” was the line that led Neil to realize David Tennant would be perfect for Crowley.

13. He is pictured on the ALA’s poster holding Wind in the Willows because, as a child, “it messed up my head.” He said he is “in love” with a chapter in the middle called The Piper at the Gates of Dawn where the characters meet Pan. It’s often left out of printings, which makes him sad because it is “strange, beautiful, luminous”.

14. TOATEOTL was originally planned to go to Broadway. Then, Covid. They did a “world tour” instead. Now that it’s wrapped, talks about Broadway are happening. He says all of adaptations of his work, this is his favorite.

15. “Disney’s Aladdin plays four times a day in Hell”

16. His favorite question of the night was “WHY did you think of the Other Mother?” He was tickled by the word choice of “why”

17. Asked the library in Sussex “What have you got in the way of really good horror for four year olds?” Obviously none existed so he wrote Coraline.

18. Talked about going viral for being in a falafel, seemed to marvel at the progression of the meme’s meaning.

19. “Tumblr is its own madness”

20. “Stephen King has fabulous stories about meeting fans in toilets, including being passed a book under the stall”

21. Read “The Day the Saucers Came” which I misheard initially as Sauces. Saucers is definitely better.

22. “You want to see me doing Dickens?” I laughed inappropriately at this. I was the only one.

23. I don’t want to say what pieces he read because I want you to buy tickets to his events. But it was very nice to be read to by Neil Gaiman.

It’s very worth it to go. I flew out from San Diego for this and would do it again in a heartbeat!

[Image Description: A digitally colored three-panel comic of Jonathan Sims, a thin, medium dark skinned man with short cropped grey hair in a striped hoodie and grey sweatpants, and Martin Blackwood, a tall, fat, light-skinned man with long blond hair in a ponytail wearing glasses, a black t-shirt and jeans. Left: Jon and Martin stand facing each other, hands resting on the other's upper arms. Jon is speaking throughout while Martin looks away embarrassed.

Jon: To start, I had a thing for you before I was framed for murder.

Top right: Jon has raised his hands to Martin's face. Martin looks surprised.

Jon: Regarding whether we would've "happened"- Yes, under the conditions that you call me out for being an ass and I crack under pressure as an employee. (Inevitable)

Bottom right: Jon hugs Martin, tucking his head under Martin's chin.

Jon: And then you fall in love with me because I'm a mess. Like in real life.

End ID]

given more time i think jon wouldve had a powerpoint in MAG 199 so he gets one Somewhere Else

Are Game Blogs Uniquely Lost?

All this started with my looking for the old devlog of Storyteller. I know at some point it was linked from the blogroll on the Braid devlog. Then I tried to look at on old devlog of another game that is still available. The domain for Storyteller is still active. The devblog is gone.

I tried an old bookmark from an old PC (5 PCs ago, I think). It was a web site linked to pixel art and programming tutorials. Instead of linking to the pages directly, some links link led to a twitter threads by authors that collected their work posted on different sites. Some twitter threads are gone because the users were were suspended, or had deleted their accounts voluntarily. Others had deleted old tweets. There was no archive. I have often seen links accompanied by "Here's a thread where $AUTHOR lists all his writing on $TOPIC". I wonder if the sites are still there, and only the tweets are gone.

A lot of "games studies" around 2010 happened on blogs, not in journals. Games studies was online-first, HTML-first, with trackbacks, tags, RSS and comment sections. The work that was published in PDF form in journals and conference proceedings is still there. The blogs are gone. The comment sections are gone. Kill screen daily is gone.

I followed a link from critical-distance.com to a blog post. That blog is gone. The domain is for sale. In the Wayback Machine, I found the link. It pointed to the comment section of another blog. The other blog has removed its comment sections and excluded itself from the Wayback Machine.

I wonder if games stuff is uniquely lost. Many links to game reviews at big sites lead to "page not found", but when I search the game's name, I can find the review from back in 2004. The content is still there, the content management systems have been changed multiple times.

At least my favourite tumblr about game design has been saved in the Wayback Machine: Game Design Tips.

To make my point I could list more sites, more links, 404 but archived, or completely lost, but when I look at small sites, personal sites, blogs, or even forums, I wonder if this is just confirmation bias. There must be all this other content, all these other blogs and personal sites. I don't know about tutorials for knitting, travel blogs, stamp collecting, or recipe blogs. I usually save a print version of recipes to my Download folder.

Another big community is fan fiction. They are like modding, but for books, I think. I don't know if a lot of fan fiction is lost to bit rot and link rot either. What is on AO3 will probably endure, but a lot might have gone missing when communities fandom moved from livejournal to tumblr to twitter, or when blogs moved from Wordpress to Medium to Substack.

I have identified some risk factors:

Personal home pages made from static HTML can stay up for while if the owner meticulously catalogues and links to all their writing on other sites, and if the site covers a variety of interests and topics.

Personal blogs or content management systems are likely to lose content in a software upgrade or migration to a different host.

Writing is more likely to me lost when it's for-pay writing for a smaller for-profit outlet.

A cause for sudden "mass extinction" of content is the move between social networks, or the death of a whole platform. Links to MySpace, Google+, Diaspora, and LiveJournal give me mostly or entirely 404 pages.

In the gaming space, career changes or business closures often mean old content gets deleted. If an indie game is wildly successful, the intellectual property might ge acquired. If it flops, the domain will lapse. When development is finished, maybe the devlog is deleted. When somebody reviews games at first on Steam, then on a blog, and then for a big gaming mag, the Steam reviews might stay up, but the personal site is much more likely to get cleaned up. The same goes for blogging in general, and academia. The most stable kind of content is after hours hobbyist writing by somebody who has a stable and high-paying job outside of media, academia, or journalism.

The biggest risk factor for targeted deletion is controversy. Controversial, highly-discussed and disseminated posts are more likely to be deleted than purely informative ones, and their deletion is more likely to be noticed. If somebody starts a discussion, and then later there are hundreds of links all pointing back to the start, the deletion will hurt more and be more noticeable. The most at-risk posts are those that are supposed to be controversial within a small group, but go viral outside it, or the posts that are controversial within a small group, but then the author says something about politics that draws the attention of the Internet at large to their other writings.

The second biggest risk factor for deletion is probably usefulness combined with hosting costs. This could also be the streetlight effect at work, like in the paragraph above, but the more traffic something gets, the higher the hosting costs. Certain types of content are either hard to monetise, and cost a lot of money, or they can be monetised, so the free version is deliberately deleted.

The more tech-savvy users are, the more likely they are to link between different sites, abandon a blogging platform or social network for the next thing, try to consolidate their writings by deleting their old stuff and setting up their own site, only to let the domain lapse. The more tech-savvy users are, the more likely they are to mess with the HTML of their templates or try out different blogging software.

If content is spread between multiple sites, or if links link to social network posts that link to blog post with a comment that links to a reddit comment that links to a geocities page, any link could break. If content is consolidated in a forum, maybe Archive team could save all of it with some advance notice.

All this could mean that indie games/game design theory/pixel art resources are uniquely lost, and games studies/theory of games criticism/literary criticism applied to games are especially affected by link rot. The semi-professional, semi-hobbyist indie dev, the writer straddling the line between academic and reviewer, they seem the most affected. Artists who start out just doodling and posting their work, who then get hired to work on a game, their posts are deleted. GameFAQs stay online, Steam reviews stay online, but dev logs, forums and blog comment sections are lost.

Or maybe it's only confirmation bias. If I was into restoring old cars, or knitting, or collecting stamps, or any other thing I'd think that particular community is uniquely affected by link rot, and I'd have the bookmarks to prove it.

Figuring this out is important if we want to make predictions about the future of the small web, and about the viability of different efforts to get more people to contribute. We can't figure it out now, because we can't measure the ground truth of web sites that are already gone. Right now, the small web is mostly about the small web, not about stamp collecting or knitting. If we really manage to revitalise the small web, will it be like the small web of today except bigger, the web-1.0 of old, or will certain topics and communities be lost again?