wilderdeer:

anthropwashere:

ladyyatexel:

After putting the playlists back together last night, I hooked up my iPod to my car and spent a long time in traffic today listening to the SWAN/ISH one and I thought about how certain songs take me immediately back to 2005, or 2008.   

I thought that one of the things I really, really love is that there are people out there who were there from the beginning or thereabouts and they have the same associations with these songs that I do.   Like we were doing different things, but this same set of songs takes a bunch of people back to 2006 with me and very likely inspires the same imagery of heavily damaged star-themed teenagers. 

It’s like a digital way of sharing an experience.  I thought about how it really felt to me and it really is like when you’re close enough to someone to share an inside joke, or that you were really present for an event.   And perhaps this feeling is bolstered by how high octane batshit things were in this particular fandom sphere in 2006 so there really were events that we all sat through and were witness to, but I really delighted in the idea that this musical thread could be something I share with other people.  

SWAN/ISH gave me so many great songs that I still associate with these stories.and these characters even though it’s been like, what, 8 or 9 years since I first heard about SWAN? Like VNV Nation! VNV has been my lingering favorite artist thanks to you. I have just about every album, and he is a busy damn dude.

Every once in a while I get this need to listen to some old SWAN songs too. Just a few days ago I had Conjure One’s “Center of the Sun” on repeat all damn day. And sometimes I still get giddy over the fact Tom McRae’s “Karaoke Soul” ended up in ISH.

Basically, I never thought I’d care so much about somebody’s songfic, and here we are inching alarming close to a decade after I first heard about it as fond of these teen weirdos.

I hope you don’t mind me adding to your post, but same. I really got into Creature Feature and The Editors beyond what was in SWAN/ISH, and even the other songs are a permanent part of my music experience now. I’m never going to take them out of my library because I have such a fond memory of the whole thing.

So, LYX, I’ve thanked you a lot over the years for writing and posting SWAN but what the heck, here’s another. Thank you. (And thank you especially for including the zip file of the songs! Some of them, like the Explode 16 one, I couldn’t find ANYWHERE.)

(I’m just gonna kinda talk to both of you.  If either or both of you want to respond, go for it, it’s all fair game.)

:D

I love this~

I’m having a hard time articulating that I love all this, so I’m glad I tried to in the initial post.  It’s just this super cool thing to me to pass songs along to people with something attached to them, and then they can use them to go find tons of other things.  Usually, even if I just send someone a song, I give them my ‘history’ with the song along with it, like I think it needs archaeological context or something.   I know most people won’t even think about it again, but I always feel the need to share it.  So the SWAN songs having a kind of built-in context that people still remember even when the songs become part of their usual playlists is really exciting to me.  

I hope you consider adding all the material from reSWAN to your collections too~~  A lot of what I’m using there has been stuff that’s been associated with SWANISH for years for me, so all the ‘new’ songs just feel like natural additions and companions to the original stuff.   

There was a time when I think I was responsible for like 10% of Creature Feature’s total folllowing on the internet.  Everyone I ran into had found them through SWAN.  I was concerned that someone would tell them one day that they’d discovered them by reading this story and then I’d receive some really awkward emails.  

Also, damn, like, “never thought I’d care so much about somebody’s songfic”, is like the statement of my life and I wrote the thing.  Maybe it’s different because it’s novel length?  Or because it’s worked into their world and their mythology rather than being a music video?  I don’t know! 

And you are welcome~!  For generic creating and for the zip file, haha.  Thank you for enjoying it and sharing that you did!  The Explode 16 song was given to me, and it turned out to be from a forum called Songfight, so was not something professionally released or anything, hence the difficulty in tracking it down.  Check it out, here’s the person who wrote it.   I would probably not mention any of this nonesense to them, hahaha.

“Normal and Happy” is another one people had trouble getting hold of, and it was from some performance art I had to go see as part of the curriculum at PNCA in 2007.   At the time, there was nothing online and I was the sole provider of that one, so if you didn’t get it from me, you didn’t have it, but now they have their own YouTube channel so now along with the other ambient and somewhat assaulting audio you can see some of the imagery I was was subjected too in order to obtain this!  I bought their CD, so, I mean, I obviously didn’t hate it.   I lost the CD when I had to leave Portland, but still have the digital copy I made. Unfortunately, there are no track listings, but now that I’ve just found their website, I can find out!  They have all the music and photos from that show listed, even.  The song I used is number 8 here. :)

(via wilderdeer-deactivated20170227)

I think this game is doing so well because so many of us have been trying to play this game our whole lives.  

We’ve all been upset at having to kill characters we liked just to prove that we should be allowed to keep going in the game.  We’ve all met characters who join us when we’ve done something less than stellar to people they know and most games have no way to prompt a reaction let alone have one.  

In so many games, a battle in which you opt not to fight is a bonus/secret/alternate boss, usually a character who is a mimic or a religious person with a rare item who wants to see if you’re pure of heart enough to really have a chance against the big bad.  It’s usually not mandatory to encounter these folks in order to beat the game or even to get the best ending.

  There’s that post on tumblr that says something like: 

me: *tells everyone to ‘Fight me’ over every opinion*
me: *can’t even choose the mean option in video games*

and it’s got thousands of notes, because of course it does. 

Meanwhile, it rarely even matters when you choose the ‘mean’ or rude option in other games, you still get largely the same outcome, yet so many of us play like it’s this game, like it’ll hurt somebody, because we want the characters to like us or we like them.  Some games, yeah, sure, maybe that person won’t join you or or you’ll miss out on getting a key to a box or something, but it’s rarely a massive literal game changer in that the rest of the world empties out in front of you or that the final boss cares at all what you did in order to reach them. 

I keep thinking about this compared to Chrono Cross (originally for the Playstation, and a sort of cousin to Chrono Trigger), which actually does do some of this on a certain scale and seemed to really be trying to convey similar things, but it eliminated the player’s choice and had already condemned them from the get go.  

The enemies in the game were screaming out that humans were ruining things, killing things, that they were greedy monsters, yet the only way to proceed was to prove them right and mow down everything in sight.  You had to murder the monster or drain the lake or beat up the native population or whatever.  And my brother and I really enjoyed Chrono Cross, even!   But that evil humanity stuff has always sat kinda funny, it was like they just did not make that final step of letting you feel the condemnation or reward.  You had a choice of maybe which flavor bad thing you did, but you had to act, you had to kill something.  It was still very confined, and the game was going to end up largely the same shape in the end.  The lesson of choice is more powerful when you really get to make it, not when its made for you.  

Chrono Cross does do this a little, and tries to do something in its final boss fight that Undertale does for the whole game. Spoiler for Chrono Cross: you have to use elements to play a song for the final boss rather than attack it to get the best/proper ending, but the game does not do a good job of conveying that this is ever an option, really.   It has some of the basics, like some characters won’t join you if you do this thing or will if you do that thing, and it’s impossible to get all the characters on a single run through the game - but it’s like clusters of them exist in a vacuum:  they’ve heard of heroic shit you did - they haven’t heard that you left some girl to die or broke into a mansion or said something mean to the kid who works the docks or whatever.  You’ll get reactions occasionally - Korcha will take your shit and call you out if you don’t want to save Kid, but the game will force Kid to be okay anyway, and as I recall you even still end up Korcha and/or his family.  So maybe you don’t end up with Korcha, but no one else hears about what you did.  Kid certainly doesn’t go around telling people you just shrugged and said ‘heck with this’ when she was poisoned.  

 Meanwhile, Undyne will try to mess up your life and will refuse to associate with you if you so much as kill a frog before meeting her.  Chrono Cross forces you to kill several endangered species (and then be lectured for it) but will still take you to the sameish conclusion, and Undertale will put you on the path to a neutral end if you harm a kind of mold…thing.

So this game feels like it was really made for a lot of people who have been trying so hard to play games like Chrono Cross, who probably even enjoyed them, who have been willing to say, “Okay, yes, these are people, and ooh, I have choices and they’re important!” and then not having the games they’re playing go the whole way with their end of ‘these are people’ bargain.  It was kind of refreshing to know that ‘not killing’ was literally always the right answer in Undertale.  There was no trick that being a snarky asshole was actually the thing that would endear you and get you the rare item or whatever.  This ended up being a pretty perfect media experience for sensitive people who grew up getting emotionally attached to pixels and midis.   

Speaking of midis, the ending, and hearing the really lovely victory/end music over the whole world when I went back over it to talk to people, as though my celebration did not end when I stepped out of the room, was really wonderful.  I’ve had opportunities to talk to the world just before the final ending credits stuff in other games and the euphoric sort of joy is always taken away when the regular ‘area’ music returns, especially if it’s the ominous kind of stuff that usually comes with final locations.  Like the whole world did not experience the face-melting finale action I did, even if it was likely on an epic scale and probably jacked up their weather or changed the construction of their world.  Usually, they’d still say the same thing “The king’s throne room is through here,” type stuff that they did before I stood in the tallest tower in their world and detonated a sun.  So that this game had everyone, even the shopkeepers, saying, wow, I can feel that the world has changed actually made the experience that much more rewarding and like it really did have big effects.  It wasn’t just my character and six or seven other weirdos who had an experience, their whole world did.  

I’ve HAD guilt before about resetting a game to play again through, like I was robbing people of memories, which is probably my general isolation for most of my life talking, but to have this game even address that?  Dang.  

I’m just sort of forced to assume that I’m not the only person who has been trying for years to play every game the way you play Undertale.  

haldora:

ladyyatexel

replied to your post

“DO BAB5 DO IT COME OOOOON”

I feel the same way about Londo and Adira, you’re safe with me at least! I couldn’t believe him capable of separating her from his ex-wife, and I couldn’t get by her having been enslaved and presumably forced into dancing and sleeping with people.

Oh, it’s such a relief to find someone else who shares my feelings on this. I might just be hanging out in the wrong places, but it’s always seemed to me that Londo/Adira is regarded as unquestionably sacred in fandom? Possibly because it’s the first romantic relationship depicted in the show. Also maybe because Adira was the first character to bring out the kind, sensitive side of Londo that I think a lot of people like to latch onto and hold tight once season 2 rolls around – and understandably so.

But yes. Like you, I could never really get past the parallels between Adira and his first wife. As such, I have a hard time believing he ever loved her as a person in her own right. Not that he really had the chance, considering that their entire relationship was originally predicated on her manipulating him into revealing state secrets. I’m willing to believe that she eventually might have developed feelings for him, but I don’t think that the way Adira acts in Born to the Purple can be taken as a reflection of her authentic personality. Londo has no idea what Adira is actually like beyond the sweet facade she tailored for the sake of seducing him specifically. Who knows if he’d even like what he found once she let the mask drop, you know?

This isn’t to say that I’m glad she was fridged, though. It always felt gratuitous to me, and there were better means available to get Londo back into Morden’s trap at that point (if he even needed to be, from a narrative standpoint). But I’ve also never cared for the oft-discussed fantasy alternative where she comes back and they resume their relationship and everything is sparkles and roses forever? I think a more interesting way events could have played out would be that during Adira’s years enjoying her freedom, she met someone new (perhaps approximately of her own age and social standing – for the record, she’s always come off to me as a noblewoman from a disgraced family) or she’s become involved in some independent pursuits that have made the prospect of a life with Londo much less appealing. And her coming back to B5 was so that she could break the news to him in person.

I feel like this option could have offered a big developments for Londo, and furthermore, established Adira as a person with her own dreams and desires apart from the guy who saved her.

A (predictable) ton of word spew regarding my wtf???? feelings about Adira under the cut, along with some anger about the treatment of of women in sci-fi, perhaps generic B5 spoilers and some spoilers for late seasons DS9, even, because I see some similarities between Adira and a certain Bajoran/Cardassian girl. 

Keep reading

When you were young and in school and your class won a contest or sold the fuck out of some hyper expensive candy and festive tins of popcorn, what did you get as a reward?  A pizza party.  

People getting together for movies? “Hey, man, yeah, come over, we’re ordering pizza.”  Yes, there will probably be chips, and maybe even a festive tin of popcorn, but the draw is the pizza, the motivator is the pizza, the pizza is the only thing that is mentioned.

Having a staff meeting, and you want to encourage attendance? Pizza.

I don’t think I have ever been asked in my entire life whether or not I like pizza, only what kind.   And I fucking love pizza.  I literally just ordered some minutes before I began typing this and I ordered one for like four people so I can eat it as leftovers for DAYS.

So maybe what you need to do here is imagine (or reflect on your own experience) that you do not really like pizza and are kind of tired of every event being ~*~*~*~PIZZA~*~*~*~

Because this is kind of what being somewhere on the asexual spectrum is like, and it’s definitely applied in fandom, where I’ve seen porn used as a reward, as an incentive, and to encourage participation.   It’s also often seen as an expected default in certain circles.  

I feel already like I need to get several things out of the way to dive into this:

• I am not shaming your enjoyment of porn.  Fuck knows women get some serious shit for liking anything - if you don’t like porn you’re girly and prudish and childish, if you do, you’re somehow less female and ‘nasty’, virgin or whore dichotomy etc etc, shit is gross.  I’m not about that turning this into that, I’m just relaying some experiences and thoughts I’ve had.  If porn has been a great transformative thing in your life, rad, but the place for that is not here, thanks! 
  
• I’m not complaining.  People make what they make.  This is just stuff I’ve experienced and just some things to think about for a minute or longer. I’m just kind of illustrating the way some things are for me. Everyone is different, etc etc etc.
• I really don’t like being called 'ace’, so if you’re planning to reply to this or reblog it or whatever, please don’t refer to me that way.  I’m not entirely sure I have a label for how I roll, and so I don’t really go into a description of my particular preferences and freakouts, but it’s on the asexual spectrum, so 'asexual’ is fine.  Just please no 'ace.’  I don’t like that as a nickname for asexual in general, but I know some people use it to refer to themselves and really like it, so please just don’t use it to include me.  Thanks.
  

 That said:

Keep reading

Well this was a nice read. It’s different for how the characters, especially Edgar, are stronger, and for how the scenes move faster, which caught me off guard. Strange. I loved it. The idea of the multiple reflections is getting me very intrigued.

:D! 

I’m happy to get someone who has read the other one recently enough to make these comparisons!  

One of the biggest things that hit me when I looked at the original version was how hard to stomach Edgar was for me in a good portion of SWAN. The first version of this story was very obviously written by an insecure teenager, which served it well at the time since it was also about and being read by a lot of them. And validation of the existence of those feelings is good sometimes, but this was too much.  I feel like there’s character development (which he definitely got!) and then there’s just excessive covering for not knowing what I was doing, haha.   Edgar was so much just the normal quiet dude among all these people who had some serious shit going on and they kind of happened to him, and I wanted him to be a bit more integrated into the world, so there is something different about him from the very first line. (Which is the line I thought of in the car that sparked all this, so Edgar has been leading this show so far!)

He’s still completely baffled and taken in by Johnny, and Johnny is still the main catalyst for most of the shit that happens, but Edgar’s got some different opinions and motivations than he had before!  

Tenna is also present at all, and she didn’t show up until several chapters in before!  I loved writing bits with her included since she is just on this train to have fun and doesn’t give much of a shit about anything beyond that and Devi.

And the other thing that hit me upon looking at these chapters was definitely pacing, so I’m glad you mentioned that too!  There was a lot of treading water happening in the original, some because I was doing everything by the seat of my pants and was just building as I went, and some because Edgar was just not strong enough to swim.

 I hope the pace didn’t catch you off guard in a bad way because there’s a bit more of that to come!  With Edgar as a stronger person and character, the story moves differently, especially with the same added strength to Johnny. I really became re-enchanted with them when I realized what they were doing to the story, and I stopped mid-way through chapter three this time not because I ran out of steam (anything but), but that I suddenly realized I was going to change a large chunk of it and decided I wanted to do it properly rather than just fart out there.

Thank you so much for reading it. I’m so happy you enjoyed it, and I hope you read however much more of it I end up with!

feltelures:

tinsnip:

bmouse said: I am afraid to watch that episode. Liking Julian with some of his interactions with women is really hard and sometimes the show is not ‘on’ enough to clearly codify ‘no, bad, this is not the way you should do things IRL’ handsome and well meaning.

Oh, God, I hear you. I was scared to watch it too. You know what, though? It’s actually a really good episode. The show doesn’t suggest that what Julian’s doing is right or deserved in any way. It kind of very subtly suggests exactly the opposite, in fact. Julian’s interactions with Sarina are often shot with someone watching in the background—Ezri leaps to mind—and you definitely get the sense that Julian is falling hard hard hard and that this is not a desirable thing.

My heart breaks for the guy. He is lonely as hell. I hear that he and Sarina get together in the novels, and I could almost kind of see that: give her, like, ten years. Let her figure out who she is. Then she might come looking for him, who knows? But God, let her have a life first before she gets eaten alive by the Julian Bashir Romance Engine.

(Also this episode has lots and lots of Julian making sexy faces just thought I’d throw that out there mayyyyyy have taken rather a lot of screenshots which need to be put up when I’m less thinky about it)

…Huh. You know, I ended up taking away a very different message from this. (Hope you don’t mind me jumping in, here, by the way….) I mean, I got that they were saying that Julian was moving too fast (AND HOW JFC), but it really bothered me a lot that Jack was supposedly no longer a legit crush for Sarina because she was now (mostly) neurotypical and he wasn’t.

Because of that and the way Sarina’s recovery ended up all about Julian, I really found this episode extremely difficult to watch. Julian’s really fucking creepy behaviour might have been condemned to a point in this one, but given his past history of creepy behaviour involving dating patients, I wish they’d been a hell of a lot more obvious about it.

(Then again, since the episode bothered me so much, I was spending most of my time browsing tumblr and just listening along, so I almost certainly missed things….)

ETA: Also, Ezri in particular really should have just gone, “Julian, I know you’re lonely, but this woman has spent almost her entire life unable to interact with the outside world, except in very minor ways. Stop.” But, well, then they wouldn’t have had an episode….

I had similar feelings about this.  I did not feel like Julian’s behavior was *really* being condemned until the last five minutes of the episode when Sarina finally said no. I was so relieved.  Julian’s friends were far too nice about all this. It was nice to see that he had nice friends, and that they were not the type to tell him he’s being a damn fool, but someone else really should have had some kind of talk with him about what a train wreck he was about to walk into/cause.  

I felt for Julian initially, because I resonate with ‘I am stuck in a place alone with no one like me’ and because I’m already predisposed to really love him, but it did not take long at all for that episode to make me embarrassed that I loved Bashir for a good 45 minutes.  I was really shocked and disgusted that they had him behave this way so far into the show.  It’s not excusable stuff no matter when he does it, but early on you can see it as something he grows out of, and it’s sort of a mark of his character development.  

What Vyc said about Ezri is right on the money.  Here we had a professional who should have been able to just lay this out, ('Yes, Julian but what does she want to do in life?’ 'I don’t know?’ 'And she doesn’t either. She’s used to people steering her around and making decisions for her, *you need to let her figure herself out*.’) and instead I spent the whole episode feeling like my skin was going to crawl off because I legitimately DID NOT KNOW if they were going to let Sarina have any kind of personal agency at all.  I want to say, 'because it was the 90s’ as the reason I did not know know this, but frankly, it could happen today too. 

(I didn’t remember anything about Sarina having an actual crush on Jack, it had been so long since I’d seen an episode with these guys.  And I think when I heard it, I just thought that Jack had made it up because literally all Sarina did was sit and stare? I’m not sure how anyone could know she had a crush even if she did?  But that’s certainly interesting.)

(via feltelures)