Intriguing Sociologically

horrifiedanomaly

horrifiedanomaly asked:

ExPostFacto from your wips sounds cool. what's that about?

This was a pesterlog-based ex post facto bloodswap, where the trolls won the game, but upon entering the door that appeared, they were for some reason all sent back to the original Alternia, but were all bloodswapped and basically situation-swapped based on the order they entered the door in. The order I had planned was:

Nepeta -> Karkat -> Gamzee -> Vriska -> Kanaya -> Eridan -> Sollux -> Equius -> Aradia -> Tavros -> Terezi -> Feferi -> Nepeta

I had four pesterlogs written for this, which I don’t think were particularly brilliant pieces of writing or anything, but they were:

Karkat trolls Nepeta because he’s figured out what happened and wants to make sure she’s ok and hasn’t been murdered for being a mutant or something. Equius answers using her account, because apparently some shit did go down, and he heard about it from the ghosts of the people she killed, but it’s ok, because she did kill everyone and she’s asleep now. Equius is also having some Issues with him being a rustblood and Karkat being a highblood now, which Karkat is not having, and Karkat is not able to get in touch with Gamzee.
Vris<>Kan pesterlog in which Kanaya has a lot of complaints about the general state of Eridan’s hive and his seadweller anatomy that she now has, and Vriska is over the moon to have Kanaya’s lusus instead of Spidermom, until Kanaya reminds her that Kanaya’s lusus was supposed to die the day they played Sgrub even without the meteors. Kanaya goes over to help her out. There’s some D’:::: and some <><><><><><><><>.
Sollux and Eridan pesterlog where Eridan insults Sollux’s living arrangements and lusus, Sollux makes fun of him for getting stuck with his old stuff, and they argue about whether Sollux getting Equius’s inconvenient strength counts as “highblood physique” and whether Eridan ever even had “highblood physique” in the first place. Eridan accidentally eats the mind honey and destroys the hivestem with Sollux’s powers.
Scourge-sisters-colored PB&J pesterlog in which Tavros is inconveniently stuck in Terezi’s tree and Gamzee is unhelpfully trying to fix this problem with Vriska’s mind powers. I only got partway through this one.

It looks like I had a Karkat + Terezi pesterlog planned for the fifth one, but I can no longer remember what it was about. I no longer remember how this was going to resolve - it was actually for a kink meme prompt (that I think was literally just “ex post facto bloodswap” and nothing else), so it’s possible that I never came up with an ending and was just going to sort of meander around for a while and see if any idea came to me.

longroadstonowhere

longroadstonowhere asked:

always love a good scheherazade reference, what do you wanna share about that fic?

I actually had a really specific and detailed plan for this one that I still remember. It was going to be a Gam<>Kar No-SGrub AU of the general genre where adult Karkat initiates a revolution against HIC and remakes Alternian society in a more equitable way, etc. Only, this is from Gamzee’s POV (who never knew any of the other trolls growing up), after he’s become unstable sort of similar to what happened during Murderstuck, and basically locked up and given convicted (or “convicted”) prisoners to kill, which is what usually winds up eventually happening to most trolls of his caste in this worldbuilding. One day, the prisoner he’s given to kill is Karkat. I did write this opening for it, which is the only thing I actually wound up writing out:

“Now what motherfucker are you supposed to be?”

He still looks ready for that fight, but you can tell he knows there’d be no contest; they never would have let him keep his strife specibus otherwise. He’s got his sickle up and beared like a one motherfuck of an uncomfortable security blanket, but you can’t feel his fear and that is almost uncanny. “I’m your new ‘moirail’, of course,” he says. You can hear the enclosure talons without any help from his fingers.

“My what now?”

“Don’t you know how this works?” His mouth quirks into a dark sort of smirk, a faint patina of japery layered on top of sweeps of bitterness and hopelessness. You’d be a liar if you said you didn’t know it well, from the inside and the out; some of these fuckers have a great sense of gallows humor about the whole thing, and it’s well worth it to string them along for a while to see how many ways they got to make their own executions motherfucking hilarious. Ain’t nothing too sacred for mirth, you learned that long ago. “When the pet indigos get too into murder for murder’s sake, they have to be pacified. If I pacify you, they’ve got their tame killing machine under control. If not, well. Saves them the cost of my trial.”

“Ain’t no murder nor killing in here,” you remind him. “It’s culling when it’s for the good of the motherfucking Empire.”

“You really believe that, do you?” He raises his eyes to yours, and damn if they aren’t just a little too bright to be rust. Must be some genetic engineering going on that they don’t tell you shit about. His blood’ll make a nice addition to your colors if it matches.

“I believe that I don’t give a shit about the good of any Empire what’s not inside this room,” you tell him. “What are they hoping for: pale or dead?”

He radiates grim certainty and an odd determination; his emotions are the palate cleanser between the bouts of pain and terror. “They would shit themselves in pure unadulterated relief if I were to die quietly without standing a public trial.”

“Would they now?” You casually send a spike of mortal terror his way, an experiment to see if it takes. He sets his jaw and grips his weapon tighter, but he digs in his heels and powers through. He knows what you’re doing, and he knows it’s just a passing feel, but watching his pysche convulse like a bug pinned to a board while he keeps on looking like an unflappable tough guy is the most beautiful thing you’ve seen in such a long motherfucking time. He’d probably make someone a good moirail, and more’s the motherfucking pity. You grin at him, show him all your teeth. “I think I’m starting to feel pacified already. I think this might be the motherfucking serendipity right here.”

(Presumably this takes place on some planet that isn’t Alternia, since adults are banned from there, but since most of it just takes place in Gamzee’s cell, I never really wrote anything about what kind of planet it was.)

Anyway, in subsequent chapters, Gamzee would sort of think about killing him again, and then Karkat would tell him a story about one of the other ten canon trolls, and their life in the Empire as an adult, and the ways HIC had fucked them over, etc., and it would calm Gamzee down, and he would decide not to kill Karkat. This continues until all ten of the other trolls have had their stories told, and Gamzee gradually genuinely falls in pale, etc. Then Karkat somehow disappears, but when Gamzee asks his handlers about it, they don’t actually know who Karkat is.

The next day, someone smuggles Gamzee out of the cell, and he winds up face-to-face with Karkat and all the other canon trolls and they explain: Karkat is raising a revolution, etc. and as part of that, he wants to reach out to every single blood caste and show them all how HIC is bad for everyone, and, to that end, he is collecting a story from someone from every blood caste illustrating this, but he ran into a snag where he wasn’t actually able to meet any adult indigos until he was finally able to sneak in to Gamzee’s cell. And now they want Gamzee’s story.

Gamzee tells them his story, gets smuggled back into his cell, is morose for a while about how the pale thing wasn’t actually real, but then the revolution happens and Gamzee gets busted out and there’s a scene that I have in my notes as Troll Ending of Fight Club, Basically where Karkat is like, I’m sorry I lied to you but you see it was for a good cause, right? Do you want to… start over from the beginning with the pale thing? And Gamzee is like, …yeah.

And that was the story. It was going to be called “Operation Scheherazade”.

longroadstonowhere:

okay this seems like a fun little game
Rules: make a new post with the names of all the files in your WIP folder, regardless of how non-descriptive or ridiculous. People send an ask with the title that most intrigues them, then you post a snippet or tell them something about it!
i do not have many WIPs, really, but here’s what i’ve got:
mon academie heroique
riffraff
togachako debs au
little mermaid au
renora backstory

What the hell, going through my old Homestuck folder was fun, haha.

Old Homestuck stuff:

ExPostFacto

JohnVriskaKarkatBluh

Scheherazade

SecondChance

Garbage

NepetaIsGamzee

NotToday

More recent original fic (or quasi-original fic based on the Sims):

thefulcrum

theyearuniverse

talesfromtheneighorhood

crimesagainstromance

Reflections

nexusrasp:

Debunking the AI food delivery hoax that fooled Reddit
A “whistleblower” tried to corroborate his viral post with AI-generated evidence. This is how I caught him. PLUS: Grok's image-generation cr
Platformer
so i’m no huge fan of rideshare and delivery apps, but this? this post?
completely fake. the article linked above thoroughly debunks it.

It’s honestly kind of embarrassing that this fooled people. Like, think about this for a moment. Why would they call drivers “human assets” in the code? That is an incredibly vague phrase that doesn’t actually mean anything except maybe as a synonym for “human resources” which is already used to mean “employees” and is not only too vague, but also inaccurate for describing the drivers, who are contractors. Doing that would only make the database harder to use and understand. How is Uber going to programmatically make an order take longer once a driver is assigned to it? Why would making all of the orders take longer in any way benefit Uber, who earns more profit the more orders they can deliver? The guy gave an image of a name tag that says “Uber Eats” but doesn’t everyone know that “Uber Eats” is not the name of a company? The company is just called “Uber”. “Uber Eats” is the name of a product that Uber has created. It just goes on and on. You don’t need any sophisticated detective work to see that this is fake.

Also, like, they’re saying it’s AI, but I don’t see convincing proof of that. To me it just looks like someone doing creative writing on reddit, like usual.

beguilingcorpse:

actually i’m very interested in silas’s sibling/colum’s parent who is not a necromancer? or maybe just not strong enough to be the master templar? and who had to have at least three children so that their eventual sibling (who is significantly younger than them) could have a cavalier they could siphon from. fascinating implications on all fronts there

From the way Judith says “all three are genetically his nephew” I’m imagining that actual family relationships between people near the head of the Eighth House don’t align at all with genetics, and that probably all of these people were genetically engineered from DNA belonging to people who may or may not actually still have been alive at the time their “children” were created in this way, solely for the purpose of creating the best necro/cav pair to be the Master Templar.

a1-harbinger:

a conversation that didn’t happen but could have
mercymorn: why do you keep calling him “ortus”?
harrow: ……..what?
mercy: the saint of duty. his name is ortus, not ortus.
harrow: ????????
mercy: what don’t you get, infant? have you not learned to spell yet? it’s ORTUS!! G-I-D-E-O-N! not ortus!
harrow, bleeding from every orifice in her face: i see

Please, Mercy had active x-ray vision of Harrow’s brain at all times, and at one point even walked up to her and just randomly said “Gideon” to see what Harrow’s brain was going to do about that. There is a 0% chance that she didn’t know exactly what was going on with Harrow throughout at least 75% of the HtN, she was just also Not Interested in helping Harrow sort her shit out. Theoretically, she could have told, like, literally anyone else on the Mithraeum about this and they probably would have tried to help (besides Ianthe, who obviously also knew and who I think did try to help, but was severely hampered by whatever necromancy Harrow had done to her tongue before the brain surgery) but let’s be real, Mercy didn’t want Harrow to achieve full Lyctorhood and surpass her in John and Augustine’s eyes while she fell back down into last place again for another 10,000 years

kitharingtonfanfiction:

depsidase:
I would not want to be married to anyone I didn’t regard as a friend for one, and for two that I didn’t want to ride until the bed broke off the hinges.

I’m continually amazed by people who genuinely seem to think that friendship + sex = romance, and that’s like, the whole formula. Sort of ironically, I’m currently in the middle of writing an asexual lesbian romance where one of them is sex repulsed and honestly reading this perspective is hilarious to me right now

katakaluptastrophy:

dve:
alecto the ninth comes out. in it, in some manner, the narrative makes an attempt to redeem or forgive john gaius. you are:
satisfied with this
dissatisfied with this
See Results
I rather think the narrative has to, although that doesn’t necessarily mean John will accept it.
When we see the very beginning of his story, John is afraid. He’s afraid that if he admits to any kind of failure, he will become unlovable - that love is something that can be earned and lost, that forgiveness doesn’t truly exist. The path to becoming a world-annihilating horror is paved with the belief that to be fallible is to be unlovable.
John first meets the nun worrying that she will accuse him of being the antichrist, and watches her die after she has told him that “fear doesn’t help us achieve a state of grace; it deafens the heart”. Which is all rather 1 John 4:18: “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear.” 1 John is one of the New Testament letters, maybe by the same John as the gospel and the apocalypse, depending on who you ask. And it’s about how you can ~~defeat the antichrist with the power of friendship~~ recognise truth because it is characterised by love.
One of Paul’s first actions is to offer the real possibility of forgiveness to Ianthe: a forgiveness that undoes the metaphysical violence of her actions and could restore both her and Babs. Paul calls themself “the love perfected by death”, which is an Oscar Wilde reference, but also rather loops back to 1 John, and “perfect love casts out fear.”
And this idea that metaphysical violence can be undone, that it is love, not fear, that gives power, fits with what we know about Alecto the Ninth, in which it would seem there will be some kind of Harrowing of Hell. One of the fundamental aspects of the Harrowing of Hell in Catholic thought is that Jesus liberates Adam and Eve from the underworld, restores them to wholeness with God, and defeats death. John and Alecto are Adam and Eve figures in a number of ways, and it’s interesting to wonder what that might mean for them in the end game of the series.
It feels like all of these thematic threads come together to suggest that John might still have the possibility of redemption - whatever that might mean in this series. But it might be just that: a possibility.
An end that might satisfy on both options for the poll could be one where John is genuinely offered some possibility of redemption or forgiveness, and cannot or will not accept it, either because he is so blinded by his desire for vengeance, or by the strength of his belief that he is unforgivable.

I mean, I think this is obviously one of the things that’s going to happen in Alecto, but that doesn’t tell me anything about whether it will be satisfying or not. I do believe we’ll get a satisfying ending, but just the information that John will be offered forgiveness doesn’t guarantee that it will be - there are plenty of possible John-is-offered-forgiveness endings that wouldn’t be satisfying. So I can’t really respond to this poll.

When a Eurovision superfan who moderates a massive Eurovision discord server and regularly gets official press passes to watch the rehearsals so that they can comment on them to fans ahead of time decides to boycott Eurovision, you know they really done fucked up this time

Six countries have left. Winners are sending back their trophies. National final contestants are pledging not to go to Eurovision if they win. It’s just overwhelmingly clear that they don’t care at all about “unity” or “keeping the contest free of politics” or even “keeping the contest from falling into disrepute”, or literally any of the other things they claim to stand for

It’s not a political or economic boycott, not at the level of individual fans, rather than countries. It’s just that the contest isn’t fun anymore. They destroyed it

no-where-new-hero:

“this post contains mature content” it’s picture of a classical nude. it’s a photorealistic painting of someone’s hands. it’s a gifset of a kpop idol smiling. it’s a moodboard featuring someone’s bare shoulder. it’s a film still of a non-graphic bloodstain. it’s a photograph of a non-white girl sitting on a counter wearing a short skirt. it’s a meta about how sexuality is depicted in a tv show. do you see what’s happening here. the vilification of the body. the sanitizing of violence. the whitewashing of presentation. i hate it i hate it so much

Ehh

I think this is ascribing too much intentional thought and action to a robot that is not alive and does not actually have thoughts or opinions about what constitutes “mature content”