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thrown-away-opinions · 6 months

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So I made the mistake of watching the hbomberguy plagiarism video. I don't know why, because I kinda hate him and his entire shtick and his entire sanpaku-eyed desperate style of presentation that screams "please think I'm smart and that I am a moral cool guy who does good things!"

Anyways, the dumb fuck kinda missed the mark by a mile and the urgency and drama he tries to invoke amounts to being very angry that some people have made careers out of regurgitating other people's work. There's a few reasons why, but let's set this right up front: Yes, plagiarism is bad. It's a terrible thing to steal someone else's work, pass it off as your own, and then try to weasel out of it when caught. It's also an extremely stupid thing to do, especially if your job is writing reviews or giving your own opinions on some piece of media and plagiarism leads to reciting factually incorrect information.

That said, there's a few assertions and implications in this retardedly long video that stuck out to me and I want to talk, at length, about them. That these people have made a lot of money and are therefore bad. That citations or crediting sources would have changed something. That people careers have been damaged or somehow denied big piles of money because they were plagiarized.

Making a lot of money seems more like a vague sort of "rich people bad" but it's such a hollow assertion to make. Youtube financially incentivizes content creation or a certain type, quantity, and regularity. The algorithm is a slot machine. Ad revenue is just money on the table, and if someone disables the ad revenue on their videos, youtube runs ads anyways and the channel just doesn't get any of the money generated. As for stuff like patreon and parasocial simp behavior, you can't really stop people from doing what they want with their money. Hasan Piker became a millionaire because retards like throw money at him to watch other people's youtube videos and occasionally say the dumbest shit imaginable. If we could stop people from watching, let alone financially supporting dipshits, we would, but we can't. Being mad that they're making money from is just petty, especially if the implication is that being rich makes someone evil and bad, but at the same time, wishing that other people whom Hbomberguy ideologically jive with should be the rich ones instead. It's moronic.

It sounds reductive to just say "don't hate the player, hate the game" because the sort of shameless scumbags who will eagerly plagiarize and openly steal other people's work are detestable. I don't want the takeaway here to be that I think they are harmless or absolved of guilt. The problem is simply something far larger than youtube or social media. It's something that is not caused by the temptation of getting easy money from stealing ideas, but something that is inherent in the sorts of opportunistic scumbags that have always existed all throughout human history. Trying to shame them or expose them can only accomplish so much when they are already shameless to begin with.

Moving on to the value of citations, aside from being a genuinely nice and professional thing to do, it would not meaningfully change the profitability of content mill channels who largely use other people's work to rapidly produce videos faster than a real writer/researcher could script them. At most, it would add a slight bit more runtime and put more text in the very easy to ignore "about" section of a video, which would never get seen by 99% of viewers. Trying to impose some sort of labor speedbump by demanding citations and credits won't meaningfully stop these people from profiting off other people's work at a speed honest creators couldn't match anyways because they've been burdened by a sense of self-respect and honesty.

Furthermore, properly cited credit will not divert viewers and fans towards monetarily supporting the sources, nor encourage the diehards on patreon to stop donating. Youtube will still give the payout for the views and clicks and engagement on a video that can be 100% regurgitated, copied content, cited or not, regardless.

Additionally, the reasons people watch certain youtubers and types of content is often totally divorced from any thoughts about academic ethics. Most of the time, the audience doesn't even care because that doesn't even factor into their enjoyment of some background noise video or hearing a youtuber they like talk about something they might be mildly interested in.

Not to mention that there are countless successful youtubers who making a living reading reddit posts, reciting lore from fan wikis, reading 4chan greentexts in funny voices, or just "reacting" to other people's videos, just literally reading things other people have written word for word. This is content that is both directly cited and stuff that has no author to credit or cite at all but is still stolen. Despite knowing the content is stolen, uncited, plagiarized, etc, people watch them anyways and ad revenue payout happens regardless. There's functionally no difference, credited or not, but one is seemingly permissible because it's open about using other people's writing or research or ideas.

Is it a huge fucking problem that is turning the internet into a terrible place? Absolutely, but it wouldn't make a fucking difference if they cited the content they were reposting, because the core problem is actually the way youtube and other social media sites tell people they'll pay them for generating that sludge content, even if it's stolen, reposted, or purposefully made in a way to abuse the algorithm.

The last point I feel like covering is the idea that the specific plagiarists are denying money and career advancement to others by stealing from them. The implication being that because someone thinks the guy who makes awful video essays about Disney and Queerness who lifts his scripts almost 100% from books he never credits, the writers of those authors are being denied money and their careers as "voices of the queer community" or whatever, have been kneecapped because one other guy took all the credit. Implying that they would be the recipients of all the success, money, and career growth that Queer Plagiarist man, and others, have gained if they hadn't be plagiarized from.

This is moronic for a number of reasons, most of which I've already discussed. The most obvious reason being that they are often competing in completely different areas. The audiences giving clicks and views to the plagiarist aren't making the choice between purchasing a book or watching a youtuber. Published books aren't listed in youtube searches or recommendations.

People can both read books and watch youtube videos, if they want, but clicking on a youtube video isn't at all the same as shopping around to decide which creator is the most ethical and deserving of any sort of financial compensation. Even if the books were cited and listed, at most it amounts to a few sales, if any. However, the supposed outrage is the lack of citation and credit, not that we should be demanding promotion and advertising from youtubers or that every quotation or idea lifted from someone else needs to come with a proportional amount of reimbursement

If it's an article instead, like the case with the 'Man in Cave' video, there's nothing being sold and and the youtuber's career maintains the same trajectory, even if clearly cited and credited, still gains the same audience, the same patreon donors etc. At best, the article might get a few more clicks, so the outrage there is that some clickbait factoid site like Mental Floss didn't collect more ad revenue of its own, which is especially interesting since most of what Mental Floss does is repost articles from other sites with a little link at the bottom that shows you they didn't write shit. Fancy that.

But there's also this direct assertion that other people making similar content about, for example, queerness in Disney media are being denied the fame and success they rightfully deserve because someone else got more popular by being a plagiarist. While there may be a finite amount of time in the world for people to watch youtube videos about stupid bullshit, it is not so finite that it is an all or not situation. People can subscribe to more than one person about a given subject. One person being successful through plagiarism does not exclude anyone else from also being successful on their own merits. If they aren't successful, you can blame the algorithm, lack of interest, or the quality of their actual work.

A similar implication is that if someone were properly recognized for their work through being credited on a video that gets millions of views, that more job offers or interviews or some kind of improvement to their general socioeconomic status would be dropped in their lap. That may be true in matters of outright content theft where a relatively unknown creator loses all views and clicks on something that got stolen by a bigger channel, but not when we're talking about someone who already had a book publishing deal or peer reviewed research.

This kind of echoes the first point about money, but with popularity instead. Impotently whining that someone else got famous when what he wants is for someone better, less objectionable, to get the popularity... and I think that's what's really at the core of hbomberguy's stupidly long video (and this stupidly long rant). He only wants people he likes to be successful and is upset that he can't take that away from them. Plagiarism is just a convenient moral cudgel to wield and a convenient way to whip up his simple minded fans into another witch hunt.

If you go and check Internet Historian's latest video, you can see a significant amount of dislikes, and the comments section is full of people screaming about plagiarism and Tommy Tallarico, who was another target of hbomberguy's obnoxiously elaborate bullshit previously. There's no chance in hell that these people are actually outraged that mentalfloss wasn't properly credited, but they love that sensational self-righteous high they get from joining the latest angry mob whipped up by famous internet smart guy and maker of pretentious videos, hbomberguy.

Now, where does that leave us after all of that shit I just wrote? Well, if there's anything to take away, it's to understand that there are shameless, opportunistic scumbags out there who are constantly looking for their chance to exploit a system for personal gain. Not just on youtube, but everywhere. Crypto. Life coach sigma male shit. Politics. Twitter engagement farming. etc etc. As long as their behavior can be rewarded, they will continue doing it. So get better about spotting it and learn to block, filter, and excise it from whatever feeds you use and expect the same of your friends.

When it comes to the creators you follow, hold certain standards, but know that there is a limit to the moral purity you can expect from them. For most of the big ones out there, the goal is to make money. You can demand proper citations and such from all of them, but then they'll go and take a sponsorship deal from Established titles or Better help or some NFT scam, and that's exponentially worse than presenting information in a way that may making the audience incorrectly assume they've done exhaustive research on a topic when they're just quoting someone else.

And lastly: stop watching Hbomberguy. He's a sanctimonious retard.

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olomaya · 5 months

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I'm making a second post to address a second point. It's more of a request really. Basically me and my irl gf LOVE going to arcade. The sims 3 has a lot of arcade machines, but not a lot of arcade functionality. Would it be possible to make a mod where the machines give out tickets (similar to festival tickets) that you can exchange for high quality items at the kiosk? Also, adding more prizes to claw machines (I love collection plushies from claw machines, my room is stuffed).

Yeah, I hate how all the arcade machines are free, that's super annoying. I would actually want something where you have to buy festival tickets to use them rather than getting festival tickets from using them. I do know someone has said they wanted to work on a mod that is basically what you are saying so depending on where they are with it, stayed tuned!

Hiya and thanks! I think? Not sure if I should take that "yuck" personally since I was the one that converted and edited the gym board. 😅 But I appreciate you sandwiching your mild insult between compliments. 😭😭 To answer your questions, (1) Transmogrifier or create your own object and put the script in the OBJK file (Note: the board has a routing slot so you need to make sure whatever object you replace it with also has the same slots or it will be unusable), and (2) replace the MODL files of the ingredients and the linked texture images with your own mesh. You probably also should regenerate a new thumbnail for it so it shows as your replaced ingredient. I usually just delete my Thumbnails cache.

Ask a:

Licensed doctor

Common criminal (anyone in Criminal career < Level 5)

Someone that has pills in their inventory

#q&a questions #exercisemat mod #yucksandwich #privateclinicmod

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thesims3help · 6 months

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Sims 3 - Gameplay enhancing mods: CAS, Build/Buy, World, Objects + Chores & Services.

A category-based mod post. Mods and links previously featured in our Masterlist. All credits to their rightful owners.

Categories include: CAS, BB mode, (Edit) World, game objects related mods, along with chore fixes and new services.

CAS:

Truely Unique Sims

o violet on Tumblr - Pure CAS lighting mod

The Sims 3 [cas background, cas lighting mod, & cas organizers] | Patreon

CAS Sim Bin Genetics as Presets

CAS Lighting Edit

ColorLash: Eyelashes Match Eyebrow Color + Mascara

XCAS core mod: more tattoo locations, edit naked outfit, slider hack, body hair, more

Build/Buy:

One More Slot Please! (with vertical shifting)

[TS3] Catalog Search Mod | Patreon

Add Any Lot Size

No More Free Roofs by Gurra (simlogical.com)

TS3 HD Textures Series - Terrain Pack [UPDATE: Fixed road tiling]

Builder Stuff

Reworked & Improved EA Lights

Lazy Duchess — [TS3] Auto Lights Overhaul (tumblr.com)

More Light Coming Through Windows

Microwave Slots

Railings on Spiral Staircases!

Stuff on the Back of the Toilet

More 1-tile Dressers!

Decorate 6 Base Game Dressers - with more slots

"Stuff on the Fridge" Mod

What's On Your Stereo?

Showbiz, Profession & Other Trophies for Displays & Pedestals

Floor Plants Placeable On Slots [BG & SEAS]

More Slots for EA Furniture - End Tables, Coffee Tables, Windows, Bookshelves & More

Midnight Hollow Toys and All Teddies on Surfaces

Horse Trophies for Display Cases

Shelves + Extras Shift & Hide With Walls Down

So Many Shiftables! And a little more.

Shiftable Curtains

'Cortinas Festivas!' and 'Traditional Curtains' Blind Fix UPDATED!

Shiftable Televisions

Shiftable Skill and Partnership Certificates

Shiftable drafting table sketches

Fountain and Hot Tub Fixes by sydserious (simlogical.com)

Base Game Half Walls FIXED!!!!

Dangerous Stoves Mod - More Fire!

Objects:

Collection Icons and Files

Functional Washboard - Sims 4 Conversion

Harvestable Tree Default Replacement

More Harvestables

Buyable Mermadic Kelp

Same Energy Gain For Every Bed

Super Hampers -- Automatic Laundry Pick Up (Plus Bigger Hampers) by Nona Mena (simlogical.com)

Spring Harvest And CookBook

Harvestable Flowers

Better Hoverboards

Canning Station Overhaul

The Transmogrifier (aka Object Script Changer)

New and Improved 9/11/21] Functioning Well - and Off-Grid Plumbing!

No Crappy Bunk Beds!

Default Umbrellas & Parasols

Default Taxis

Digital Photo Frame Overlay Replacement

Unlocked Permanent Tents for Residential and Community Lots

Wildflower Sell Price Nerf

Buyable Beach Towels (with custom script)

Vending Machine Tweaks

Salvaged Junkyard Objects Made Usable

Make those elevators go faster! Or slower...

Toilet Tweaks

Fairy House motive tuning: Bladder and Hygiene

Buyable Culinary Career Rewards: MinusOne Kelvin Fridge by Nona Mena (simlogical.com)

[WA] Buyable Permanent Sultan's Tabernacle (Scripted object) by Nona Mena (simlogical.com)

[SEAS] Gift Pile Tweaks by Nona Mena (simlogical.com)

[SEAS] Buyable Bunch o' Gifts (Gift Pile) by Nona Mena (simlogical.com)

Motorcycle Parking Spaces

World:

Reduce/Remove Lag caused by Houseboats

SetHour Cheat

Lot Population Mod

TS3 Apartment mod - Updated for patch 1.55 - 1.63/1.67

nraas - Apartment Mod

Invisible Sim Fixer Mod by Consort (simlogical.com)

RPG Manager - Edit your Bin sims, towns and Active household!

NPCRomance

Space Rock Spawner Edit

Lunar Lakes missing EP rabbit holes by Darkitow (simlogical.com)

Auto-place official festival lots in later Store worlds

AMB Community Lots Auto Placement Fix + Add Other Lots (Compatible with Patch 1.63-1.67)

Chores + Services:

Gardener Service 2

Housekeeper Service - v1.2

Housecleaning For All Sims

Dirty Laundry Mod (Update 8/8/23) - Maid & Butler Tweaks

Butler & Maid will Feed Pets & Clean All Pets.

DouglasVeiga's Dancer Service

#the sims 3 #sims 3 #ts3 mods #sims 3 mods #post 7

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softeningthesound · 9 months

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Non-exhaustive list of reasons behind the delay when you go to pick up your meds at the pharmacy, from a pharmacy tech

It's a long one, so there'll be a read more after the first few points and more in a reblog

Tech filled a prescription for an antibiotic, but when it gets to the pharmacist, they actually need to call the doctor and have the script changed because it’s the wrong antibiotic for the infection indicated. Doctor doesn’t answer at first. Pharmacist starts validating a refill but the doctor’s office calls back and the pharmacist has to stop what they were doing.

We haven’t had time to restock the shelves with all the medications that are lying in bins in the back, and we’re out of your medication on the floor so we need to look through the order list, figure out what bin your medication is, and go rummage in the back.

Someone’s calling to get a box of Covid tests, but we have to give them our rehearsed speech on how the handing out of Covid tests in pharmacies is actually now restricted, and has been since May, to certain patients who are unvaccinated and at risk or to patients who are financially in a situation where they can’t afford to buy them, so unfortunately, person on the phone, you’ll have to go to X center or X clinic to get them, where they’re handing them out no questions asked. This call takes three minutes.

We just received a fax for someone who’s just left the hospital and we have to prepare six new medications for them and when we call the patient, they can’t get to the pharmacy on their own and no one can pick up their meds for them, so we have to organize a taxi for that person’s meds. The pharmacist also has to explain all these treatments over the phone and answer any questions the patient may have, which always takes longer than in person.

The pharmacist had to see two other patients for advice on their medications, patients who had ordered in advance but who find out at the register that the pharmacist wants to speak to them or explain this new medication or what have you, so the pharmacist takes the time to see these two patients who did order before you and also want to leave the pharmacy.

The slot for a certain medication in our pill-counting machine is empty, so I have to go fill that.

Someone’s insurance didn’t go through because they have a new card or are with a new company, so they need to go back over to the first counter and have a tech update that in their file and print the new receipt.

We… don’t have a full time cashier, so the technicians need to take turns being at the register.

It’s lunch time and people are on break, which they rightfully deserve, so there’s an employee or two less than there usually is.

You came in at the same time as four other people who also wanted just a single refill, but we still fill them one after the other and can get interrupted by phone calls, by problems at the register, etc.

We need to substitute your dosage, which is back order, for two different dosages that you’ll take at the same time. This takes more time, because we need to copy the prescription and modify it, have the “new” prescription validated by the pharmacist, have the pharmacist, legally, explain the new posology to you even if you were told at the first counter that we were going to have to make that change.

Someone wants advice for a cough syrup, and as a technician, I am not legally allowed to give any recommendations even though I know for a fact that the pharmacist is just going to say that the cough syrups we sell don’t do anything and mostly just have a placebo effect and you should just drink water. The patient has to wait behind people who came in front of them, just so the pharmacist themself can tell them that, because I can’t. It’s frustrating for me too, but I can’t say anything.

We’re behind on preparing the refills that people ordered hours ago because our day has been hectic, so I have to give you a longer wait time so that realistically, we can get some of those filled by a technician and validated by a pharmacist.

Daily patient comes in for their dose of methadone or suboxone to help with an opioid addiction, and the pharmacist has to prepare their medication, too.

This happened recently but uhhh some guy comes in pissing blood out of his arm and we urgently have to help him while we call an ambulance, and a patient comes in thirty minutes later and the blood has been mopped up and there’s no trace that anything happened but I’m at the counter and a little fucking traumatized and this patient wants me to synchronize their medications and I am not mentally processing anything

There are complicated files and prescriptions and types of ways we fill prescriptions (ex: people who get their medications weekly in these little packs sorted by day and time of day and their files are really complicated to navigate and usually taken care of by a specific technician)

Your medication is a special order medication that gets made by another pharmacy and we sent the invoice and everything and are waiting for them to send us the medication but the ball’s in their court and we still haven’t received your meds

Main reasons for delays are just… a lot of calls and lots of people coming in at the same time for refills and questions that require a varying amount of time and effort to fill and answer. People who come in when we just opened usually barely have to wait, but we have rush hours just like every other store and there are five people in front of you waiting for a counsel and/or their meds. Sometimes, a quick little refill that took the tech literally thirty seconds to fill is immediately noticed by the pharmacist and gets validated right away ahead of the more complicated cases and sent to the register, but sometimes it sits on the counter for a while because the pharmacist is resolving a difficult situation, or showing someone how to inject their insulin, or explaining side effects to someone, or in a consult to prescribe the morning-after pill and has lots of questions to ask the patient.

Sometimes, we have patients who are very mean and rude and short with us. They are often in pain, or have been slighted by the medical system, or have had bad experiences at the hospital or the pharmacy before, and they take a lot of time to talk to and try to reason with. During this time, your request, or even refilled medication, sits on the counter in a little basket waiting to be validated.

More in reblog

#pharmacy #medication #medications #meds #pharmacy tech #pharmacist #medical information

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monstrous-femme · 4 months

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@annieofhearts asked about my abandoned Trobed WIP. This is from several years ago. Basically my beautiful wife @ivanhoe-dont-do-it and I were talking about Trobed and how funny it would be to do a subverted Vegas AU.

Premise: the gang is in Vegas for a wedding (Britta to some guy they all call Taco Bell), and Abed is so freaked out about seeing Troy again that he decides they should re-enact the Hangover so that he can avoid his feelings. He roofies himself and Troy, but the roofies just put them to sleep (you know, like how roofies actually work) and when they wake up everyone else is gone.

A-Plot: Abed and Troy accidentally do the plot of Forgetting Sarah Marshall instead, and end up together.

B-Plot: Everyone else somehow winds up doing the Hangover, including Jeff as Ed Helms marrying the Dean.

Snippet under the cut

The script should make it easier, but it doesn’t, really. It used to be that he knew Troy well enough to predict his words, to write lines and trust they’d actually be said. But by the time the plane touches down in Vegas, all Abed has is this:

TROY enters the room, a soft look in his eyes as they fall on ABED. Abed’s expression doesn’t change, but he maintains careful eye-contact, like a wounded animal unsure if the person it’s seeing is here to hurt it more, or save it.

A beat.

TROY

(hoarsely)

I’m sorry I haven’t called.

Abed nods.

TROY

I just didn’t know what to say. You’re

so important to me, and I just left I didn’t

realize how much I

ABED

You don’t have to say anything.

TROY

But I want to. I needed to tell you how sorry

how much I that I (fill in later with something

that sounds like Troy)

ABED

(with feeling)

I know.

The first time they see each other again, it actually goes like this:

Abed is at baggage claim talking to Annie when her eyes get wide and she grabs his arm. The airport, which was previously so loud that Abed was considering taking out a hit on the man on a business call on the other end of the baggage carrousel, goes silent. Well, not really, but the sounds get all muted the way they do in movies when something so important happens that everything around it dims.

A slot machine makes a little triumphant noise that means someone has won something, but no coins come out because they’re all digital now.

“Troy!”

Annie’s voice is so loud and excited that Abed’s hand twitch at his side. He doesn’t cover his ears, because it’s rude, and despite what everyone thinks about him he isn’t rude on purpose.

He turns his head 45 degrees and there’s Troy, backpack over one shoulder and eyebrows pushed together just a little bit. Annie runs towards him just as her maroon wheely bag drops from the chute. Abed looks at the bag, then at her and Troy, then back at the bag.

He picks up the bag.

#tumblr messed w the script format a bit but you get the gist #trobed #troy barnes #abed nadir #community

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ginnyluvstimmy · 5 months

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—⁠☆ 𝐌𝐑𝐒. 𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐋𝐀𝐌𝐄𝐓

timothée chalamet x fem! reader

y/n's pov :

It was my first time.

It was all new, actually, and it all started a few months ago.

My best friend, after many excuses and useless motivations, convinced me to sign up for an acting audition for Hollywood recruits.

I took it a bit lightly, given that, in my opinion, there wasn't even a 0.1 chance of me passing.

And instead...the stage manager said that my acting skills were exhaustive, that I immersed myself in situations and behaved like an opera singer in front of the audience.

All this exaggeration was a little jarring and disgusting, to be honest; and when he started complimenting me I almost choked on the water.

The director and I arranged to meet at the same time for the coming weeks: he said that he soon wanted to make me participate in one of the films he was working on.

That's where I met Timothée.

Or rather, I already knew him. My walls, full of posters, my phone, with its full memory, and my mother, with her exhausted patience, knew it well.

He was talking to a staff member, and I stumbled to hide and not be seen.

At the beginning we acted in the same time slots but for different films, and luckily we didn't have time to meet or exchange a few words.

One time I caught him at the coffee machine, and thank God he was too busy on the phone to pay any attention to me.

My films had their importance and recognition, I was happy and satisfied.

My parents as well, and my friend either.

More companies asked about my presence in other top films, and having lost control of my schedule, I agreed.

"You know, you're making a great progress here, my friends really admire you," Timothée chimed in one day, paying for an energy bar from the vending machine.

"I... well, thank you" how awkward I must have seemed to him, maybe he didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

The last straw for actors like me is that, even doing it for living, I can't even maintain a reputation by pretending I'm not that shy.

Lord...I must improve.

Days passed, and the big day arrived.

Probably my most important and beautiful day ever, I like to remember it that way.

The director and screenwriter was my hero and savior from that moment on. As the new film was announced, I ran to the list of actors I would meet during filming and who would work with me.

My finger slid across the paper until I found my name and... Timothée? TIMOTHÉE?? WOULD TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET HAVE BEEN IN THE SAME FILM AS ME?!

My legs turned to jelly and if the staff hadn't come by I would have actually kissed that paper without hesitation.

The rehearsals with Timothée were the best.

We laughed, we made stupid jokes that only we laughed at and we had a lot of fun. We were kind of in our own little world and even though we seemed crazy, we were crazy together.

I was the protagonist and he was a kind of secret lover, because in the film I was engaged. According to the script we would get together because my boyfriend would turn out to be a cheater, and I was fine with Timothée being my new partner.

When the film was released in theaters my joy was uncontrollable. The views rose to a thousand, all thanks to Timothée. The tickets disappeared within a few weeks, it was incredible.

Social media indulged fans, saying the footage was amazing.

And then...the red carpet.

God, I dreamed it.

I had dreamed of it in my small room at home, with the posters and signed books.

Now the room had transformed into my stage with the lights, the spotlights and the audience.

The posters had become reality and Timmy was by my side.

On the day of the gala I was nervous, I couldn't stand up and not even a wink by the previous night.

He, however, was an angel, as always. His hair was curly and looked incredibly softer. He had a black shirt with pitch-colored pearls and underneath he revealed his bare chest accompanied by a silver necklace. I got out of the car and a crowd of paparazzi jumped on me with flashes and microphones. There were screams of amazement, thuds of those trying to make space among the people and in the general noise I didn't know how to react. It was all so fast and blurry that when the limo sped away I looked desperately for my manager. We passed the journalists and within minutes the dressing room door was within reach so I rushed inside. "It's our turn soon, ready?" a familiar voice laughed and it was silk on the ears...I would have listened to Timothée's voice all my life, his accent, his delicacy. This time I responded with a nod, I didn't want to stutter, there was no room for shyness now.

I don't know if my attraction towards him was that visible, but that little smile he gave me always seemed to tease me, to play with me. I meticulously fixed my hair and before I could reach the handle he turned and gave me his last smile. My heart ended up in my throat, it was beating like crazy but I was so anxious that it was like I couldn't hear it at all. My veins pumped and I wanted to pass out there, in that dressing room. I breathed slowly and regained my stability. Timothée's hand slipped into mine, squeezing it as if to keep me from collapsing right then. The door opened and...crowd, chaos, flashes and anxiety.

All at once: I wanted to escape.

It wasn't like in the dreams, now everyone was really hanging on my lips, now I was really famous and I had to react.

“It's okay, I'm here,” Timothée whispered in my ear, and his warm breath brought me back to life. We got on the red carpet and he indulged me in some static poses and contained smiles. After the photos some journalists went up and blocked our passage.

"Timothée, what an honor! The new film is on everyone's lips, what do you think?"

I looked at my companion, and he smiled.

"It's a good film, we put a lot of effort into it and I thank everyone who collaborated"

"And tell me Timothée, the protagonist is actually the person you will love until the end of the film. Her name?"

The microphone was now two centimeters from his full lips.

"Mrs. Chalamet" he smirked.

Wait...WHAT?!

#timothée chalamet #hollywood #actors #timmy chalamet #y/n

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dee-the-red-witch · 6 months

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Ooooh, are we doing recordings? I have a fun challenge for you. Hit YT and look for "Turbo Encabulator", posted by Dave Rondot. It's longish so I'd never ask you to do the whole thing but a snippet would be fun as hell, and I bet you'd laugh. :)

Oh we are sooooo doing this. In full, because longer scripts are better for me on practice since this is mostly about training muscle memory, maintaining breath control, and endurance at this point.

Script:

“For a number of years now, work has been proceeding in order to bring perfection to the crudely conceived idea of a transmission that would not only supply inverse reactive current for use in unilateral phase detractors, but would also be capable of automatically synchronizing cardinal grammeters. Such an instrument is the turbo encabulator.

Now basically the only new principle involved is that instead of power being generated by the relative motion of conductors and fluxes, it is produced by the modial interaction of magneto-reluctance and capacitive diractance.

The original machine had a base plate of pre-famulated amulite surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two spurving bearings were in a direct line with the panametric fan. The latter consisted simply of six hydrocoptic marzlevanes, so fitted to the ambifacient lunar waneshaft that side fumbling was effectively prevented.

The main winding was of the normal lotus-o-delta type placed in panendermic semi-boloid slots of the stator, every seventh conductor being connected by a non-reversible tremie pipe to the differential girdle spring on the “up” end of the grammeters.

The turbo-encabulator has now reached a high level of development, and it’s being successfully used in the operation of novertrunnions. Moreover, whenever a forescent skor motion is required, it may also be employed in conjunction with a drawn reciprocation dingle arm, to reduce sinusoidal repleneration.”

(Folks, please, go ahead and send more, I'll record when I can. But let's also go for like... REGULAR WORDS? The nonsense is great too, but this is just getting FRAMBULATED.)

#voice asks #asks answered #turbo encabulator #trans voice

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denimbex1986 · 6 months

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'Doctor Who has been visibly struggling for nearly a decade. Viewing figures started a decline in the Peter Capaldi era, and the lacklustre scripts of the Jodie Whittaker era meant time was up for many fans.

But the show's getting a major facelift, and in returning showrunner Russell T Davies the BBC have the man who wrote some of its greatest-ever episodes with the likes of Rose Tyler in the Tardis. Sex Education star Ncuti Gatwa will soon be piloting the time machine, but the sci-fi classic needed something to hook fans of the 2000s series back in - and has brought in the big guns with David Tennant reprising his role as the Doctor.

If you haven't watched an episode of Doctor Who since David Tennant said farewell in 2010, you'd be able to pick it right back up here with The Star Beast - the first of three specials marking his return to the show. A spaceship crash-lands on London and the Doctor is called into action - but why is Donna Noble (Catherine Tate) back in his life, and why is there (as she asks) "a bloody martian in the shed"?

Within minutes of the opening titles, Tennant is running about and ranting his way through technobabble just like the good old days. He and Catherine Tate slot effortlessly, instantly, and brilliantly back into their roles, and have the same chemistry that made them so unbelievably watchable when they first appeared on our screens.

Make no mistakes - this is a treat for the fans who were raised on the 2000s series, in the same way Sarah Jane Smith's return in 2006's School Reunion was a nod to those who spent the 1970s hiding behind the sofa from Genesis of the Daleks. It's a big, silly, geeky romp and never really pretends it's trying to be anything else.

No spoilers, but it'll have the Doctor Who nerds in your family jumping up and down on the sofa with glee - both at little references to the Doctor Donna's old adventures and at the new and improved versions of [REDACTED], [REDACTED], [REDACTED] and [REDACTED]. We said no spoilers...

It's admittedly not a perfect episode by any means, and some parts are frustratingly blighted by the issues that have dragged the show down in recent years. It's Doctor Who, and in a sci-fi world constantly rewriting itself with time travel and revealing new bits of its own canon, there's never really an expectation that everything will make perfect sense and you can forgive a bit of clunky exposition.

But some of the episode's biggest plot points come off as surprisingly trite and ill-thought-out. Similarly, Russell T Davies has always woven progressive storylines and diverse characters into his prose - here, though, the attempts to do so are frustratingly ham-fisted (even if well-intentioned and, in principle, welcome).

But the impact of Davies' return is decidedly and instantly a positive. Back at the helm after flexing his sci-fi muscles with 2019's Years and Years and delivering one of the past decade's great character pieces with It's a Sin, it's a complete given he'll write jokes that actually land and emotional beats with some genuine oomph to them.

Donna's relationship with her daughter Rose (Yasmin Finney), for instance, is genuinely sweet and is the perfect step forward in Donna's life where we find her: without her memories of the Doctor and a good 15 years into domestic life. Her mum Sylvia, despite having softened from the constantly-haranguing busybody she was in the earlier series, is as hilarious as ever and it's not long before she and David Tennant are trading barbed words again.

In short, it's nice to be able, once again, to assume that an episode of Doctor Who will be fun, rather than sit through the last five minutes of Countryfile praying you aren't about to be bored silly for the best part of an hour. Just as the worst episodes of Doctor Who feel like they drag on for hours and hours, this one zips along and is gone in a flash like the very best. Bug-eyed monsters, spaceships in London and Catherine Tate yelling at people - this is Doctor Who as you know and love it, but with shinier CGI, better cameras and jokes about pronouns.

David Tennant said on The One Show that this first special was "the world of Doctor Who that you'll recognise," but the second is "unlike any episode of Doctor Who ever done before". Eagle-eyed fans will tell you that between two trailers, endless online clips, and a string of interviews, posters and previews, we know next to nothing about the second of Tennant and Tate's trio of specials, Wild Blue Yonder.

As the credits roll on The Star Beast, there's a sense that show's creators have kept the cards close to their chest with the first 60th anniversary special. It'll well and truly whet your appetite, though - and there's clearly a lot more to come.'

#David Tennant #Catherine Tate #Donna Noble #Yasmin Finney #Rose Noble #Russell T. Davies #The Star Beast #Wild Blue Yonder #Doctor Who #60th Anniversary #Sarah Jane Smith #School Reunion

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alfvaen · 2 months

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Novel Madness

Still reading, and apparently still blogging about it.

So this is what I read in March. Possible spoilers for the Vorkosigan Saga, and the Mercy Thompson and Peter Grant series, among others.

Jeffrey Cranor & Janina Matthewson: You Feel It Just Below The Ribs, completed March 2

So as you may recall, back in February, I had given up on Ruth Ozeki's A Tale From The Time Being, wasn't fond of Kristen Painter's Flesh And Blood, and was also not really liking the nonfiction book on Reddit I was reading.

I was somewhat tempted to just skip ahead to my reread of Memory, my favourite book in the Vorkosigan series. I mean, when I had started doing more frequent rereads, it had been after just such a string of subpar books, and I wanted to retrench and remind myself why I loved reading. Looking back in my records, I can't actually find that string of subpar books, but I can find about when I started doing the rereads--the fall of 2007, when I started doing a Wheel of Time reread, where every second book was a reread; it was the first time I reread the entire series (up to that point, which was Knife of Dreams). After that, my rereads went back to their more sporadic pace, until the spring of 2008 when I did an every-second-book reread of the Vorkosigan saga (the first of three such rereads in the next few years). And I kept doing every-second-book-a-reread for two years, at which point I slowed down to mostly every third book. By 2012 this was down to every fourth book, and there it seemed to stabilize. So it wouldn't be unprecedented for me to do my rereads more frequently, but the cycle has been stable for a while--I added in the alternation of author gender, the diversity slot, the trying-out slot…it would throw my cycle off now if I did the rereads more frequently. But don't think I wasn't tempted.

Anyway… I was looking for a male author, something that wasn't urban fantasy (because of the Kristen Painter), probably something that wasn't space opera (because Memory was still coming up)… I toyed with the idea of selecting something that might be "fun" (like John Scalzi's Agent To The Stars or the Doctor Who And The Krikkitmen book), but there were also books that I had been thinking "maybe" on for some time and hadn't yet picked up. And You Feel It Just Below The Ribs was one of them.

Many of you are likely familiar with Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor's "Welcome To Night Vale" podcast, which I discovered relatively early (by current standards--maybe around the "Sandstorm" episodes?). I've see the show a couple of times when it came through (or near) Edmonton, I try to keep up on the podcast (though mostly I fail because I can't keep up with a bimonthly podcast schedule any more), and I have read all of the tie-in novels and the script books. The novels are decent, not great, but okay. And I have also tried out a lot of the other related podcasts--"Alice Isn't Dead" and "Within The Wires" are the ones I stuck with.

"Within The Wires" was always weird, and not every season was great, but it was an interesting combination of two conceits--one, that every season was done through "found audio", which included relaxation tapes with hidden messages, dictaphone recordings, answering machine messages, and museum audio guide recordings, among others. And two, that this all took place in an alternate history where, due to an early-20th-century upheaval called The Reckoning, the new regime had taken the drastic step of abolishing the family: breaking the emotional links between parent and child by altering their memories and raising the children in communal creches. (There's also a distinct shortage of male characters in the podcast, which is fine--at some point I'd even thought that men had been wiped out entirely, but there are occasional male characters mentioned now and then. And the new season features a male voice actor for the first time.) But we've never really gotten much detail about the Reckoning, because it was too far in the past, and nobody needed to talk about it much because it was just part of their common world. (Maybe in the season where we were following a woman who was part of a secret rebel group that did raise their own children, but even then we didn't get much.) So I was very interested in the novel that they came out with, in hopes that we would find out more about what the Reckoning actually was and how the change in society came about.

It's a bit of an odd novel--it has a sort of framing story of it being a found document, and has frequent footnotes. But I'm not clear why it was done like this. The document is the memoirs of a woman who was orphaned during the Reckoning--which seems here to have been a worst-case version of World War I that lasted until 1941 and did literally engulf the entire world, possibly with a worse flu pandemic as well. (This was published during Covid so that may have affected things a little.) The author, Miriam Gregory, ended up being influential to the whole post-Reckoning New Society practice of editing memories to remove parent-child bonds. She later got involved with the mysterious Institute from the first season, and there were some hints of the plot from the third (the political thriller told through dictaphone recordings). The footnotes mostly seem to be there to try to point out places where the editors of the document found stuff they were pretty sure was inaccurate. They quoted information from the official record and mentioned when there was no evidence of something existing or having happened at all. Which, okay, maybe this was people parroting the official history even with all its inaccuracies, as a method of showing how the truth had been hidden. But supposedly the publication of this document was being done by a group which was already not following the New Society party line, so why would they be so certain that this was wrong whenever it contradicted the accepted source of truth? It's not clear, and so it seems like they're just there to undermine the story whenever it gets too dramatic. It doesn't feel like an effective technique.

Overall it was a decent book, but flawed, and I felt like it could have covered more of the world than it did.

Lois McMaster Bujold: Memory, completed March 5

I have probably mentioned before that Memory is my flat-out favourite Bujold book. It's not an easy one to recommend to other people, though, because it may only work (and certainly works much better) if you've read all the previous books first. Jo Walton has talked about the "spearpoint theory", where a tiny sharp point can be made much more effective if you've had a lot of buildup to it. This book has a shaft consisting of all the Miles books and stories that came before. Obviously Mirror Dance, of course, the immediate prequel, but it has an especially poignant revisiting of "The Mountains of Mourning", as well as the reappearance of Duv Galeni from Brothers In Arms, and robust roles for Emperor Gregor Vorbarra, Delia Koudelka, Ivan Vorpatril, and Simon Illyan, who is central to the plot. It also has one of the dullest titles in the series, though it is relevant, not least because of the reference to Simon Illyan's eidetic memory chip.

The first part is the most painful, as Miles manages to lose most of what's important to himself through an attempt to keep it from slipping away. But I love almost every scene that takes place on Barrayar. It's such a treat just to see Miles coping with day-to-day life there (my favourite bit is still the convenience-store "Reddi-Meals!"), plunged back into a life he's been neglecting for years, that it doesn't even feel disappointing when it's over a third of a way into the book before the "real" plot really gets going. Because the shaft of that spear is still building up.

In later rereads, there are some bits I find fascinating. Like the worldbuilding details about the existence of Imperial Auditors, special investigators answerable only to the Emperor himself, that actually were never mentioned before in the series. But the way the native Barrayarans explain it to one Komarran feels completely organic, and they've known it all along, so surely these Auditors have been mentioned before? Nope, they're probably something that the author pulled out of her hat for this book (there were "auditors" mentioned in the framing story of Borders of Infinity, but I think they were just regular auditors, not Imperial ones). But if feels like they've always been in the background. (Maybe, if they were, they should have been mentioned in Barrayar somewhere? Well, whatever. Good enough.) Also, there was one relationship that blindsided me first time through, but now I can spot all the groundwork being laid for it all the way through. Very deft.

Steven Barnes: Zulu Heart, completed March 12

Next, according to my cycle, it was time for a book by a "diverse" male author. As I may have mentioned before, I seem to be much shorter on those than I am on female diversity, particularly on the black authors.

I first read Steven Barnes many years ago, at least in collaboration. His book with Larry Niven, Dream Park, has long been a favourite; I recall one day, after a stressful move between cities, that I spent just rereading the book from cover to cover. The sequels never hit quite the same spot, though, which may be why, although I did occasionally buy a Barnes solo book in a second-hand store, I had never actually gotten around to reading any of them. But they were there when I needed to draw from them for this slot. A couple of years ago I read his Lion's Blood, an alternate history novel about a world where African (and mostly Muslim) nations colonized the New World (which I believe they called Bilalistan), and they enslaved Europeans. (I don't recall if there was an in-universe explanation for the change in dominance--maybe the ever-popular Hyper-Virulent Black Death--or if it just turned out that way. There was something about Alexander The Great maybe going to Egypt…) One of the main characters was an Irish man named Aidan who was enslaved as a child near the beginning of the book, and separated from his sister; the other one was a black Muslim named Kai, son of a Wakil in Bilalistan. It probably covers a lot of slave-story tropes, but race-swapped, plus there's also drama an intrigue centered around Kai's family. It was an okay book, but I wasn't particularly planning on searching out the sequel; however, last summer at the When Words Collide convention in Calgary, I saw it on a table of "free to a good home" books, and decided to pick it up. And having basically exhausted pretty much all the other possibilities, I was perforce reading it next.

Once of the principles I mostly stick to with the diversity books is that I don't give up on them. (Maybe I should have done this with the Ruth Ozeki book last month, but I guess I didn't.) It's supposed to be about broadening my horizons, approaching different kinds of stories, etc. I've always been a little hit-or-miss with alternate histories; my perception, at least, is that a lot of them tend to focus on the same things--the American Civil War, the American Revolutionary War, World War II--all American stuff. This one is, at least, a little more creative, and is very black culture focused in a way that, frankly, Barnes's other books I read really weren't.

Plotwise, though, it's only okay; some threads are interesting, some I'm less interested in, and some seem to be a little rushed, as if he was trying to squeeze in plots from a third book the publisher had nixed. The back cover blurb seems to imply that the book is going to cover this world's version of the Civil War, but given that they're still colonies of overseas nations (Egypt and Abyssinia) it's really more like a Revolutionary War. And, spoilers, what there is of it is not a major part of the story. In that sense it's almost more like Diana Gabaldon's later books where the (American) Revolutionary War is going on, and it affects our characters, but it's not primarily about the war itself. And maybe this book would have benefited from being even longer to have that increased scope.

I do worry a bit about the reversed slavery idea--on the one hand, maybe it'll give some of us white people a better feeling for what the Africans suffered under slavery if we replace them with Europeans. The concepts that stuck with me were things like having white slaves given Arabic or African names rather than names from their own culture, and also all the African cultures being treated as distinct things while all the European cultures get jumbled together. But I also picture some people pointing at this and saying, "See? They'd do just the same as us if they were in charge!" Which may be true, but of course it doesn't say that, in our world, the slaves in America didn't suffer, and we're not living in that alternate world. It means that one group may not be inherently nobler than another, but that doesn't mean that they're not deserving of justice, or equity, or reparations. (I can also picture frothing white supremacists screaming that this the what the blacks want, and turning it into a story of white victimhood. Well, I guess we can't control what white supremacists are going to froth about.) It's not a bad thing, but it seems like it can be mischaracterized. (One novel I was working on, I have a setting with an area's native inhabitants being oppressed by intrusive colonials, and I was toying with the idea of having the natives be white, but I'm afraid it'd get read as anti-immigrant rather than anti-colonial, so I probably won't.)

Natalie Zina Walschots: Hench, completed March 16

After the long and somewhat topically heavy slavery book, I decided I was in the mood for something maybe a little lighter, and it was time to get back to a female author. My wife had recommended this Hench book to me, and nudged me about it a couple of times, and I decided to give it a go. I know that technically I do have my special slots for new authors (with the "try but feel free to give up if it does not spark joy" parameters), but if I never tried a new author outside of those slots, then it would take forever me to try all the ones I'm interested in, so I decided to let myself read this one.

The book is clearly set in a world with superheroes, and of course supervillains. I've read a lot of comics--mainly Marvel comics from the 60s through to the 90s (my attempt at a comprehensive read-through on Marvel Unlimited has just inched its way to the end of 1993, so I may be a little behind on the current state of the superhero genre, apart from the MCU stuff) but fewer actual prose novels. I suspect that the modern superhero novel, with its narrower focus, is more prone to examining superheroes in more depth, and frankly most of them tend to come out on the anti-superhero side of things, and at the very least turns them into more complex, flawed characters. The Annihilation Score tended to treat them as problematic; Brandon Sanderson's "Reckoners" series treats them as existential threats (admittedly, in that setting their powers literally drive them insane); and at best, they are severely flawed people who just happen to have powers, as in James Alan Gardner's "Sparks Vs. The Dark" series. Maybe it's a generational thing--in an age where the status quo is far from kind to the vast majority of those who are Millennials or younger, who are your sympathies with--heroes who fight to uphold the status quo, or the villains who subvert it? (Which is not too far off from the logic from that gets people to vote for Trump…)

Hench shows us mostly the villain side of the story, with superheroes mostly shown as overpowered thugs and walking disasters. We're mostly concerned with Supercollider, an example of the former, whose every brush with our protagonist leaves her damaged, and his longtime nemesis Leviathan, who lifts her up and makes her feel valued. I keep wanting to draw analogues with the heroes I'm familiar with--is Supercollider basically Superman? Leviathan seems more like Doctor Doom than anybody. Supercollider's partner Quantum Entanglement (a bit of an awkward name) seems more like a combination of Invisible Woman and Shadowcat than anything else. (I'm always low-key amused at superhero naming where they just silently have to avoid the names of real Marvel or DC characters, without seeming to. In my superhero stories I mostly tend to think that the real heroes are afraid of getting sued by the corporate juggernauts who own the trademarks on the fictional ones…) It got a lot darker than I was expecting, actually, but it was absorbing and I liked it a lot.

Patricia Briggs: Silver Borne, completed March 19

I had originally been thinking of something like Ann Leckie's The Raven Tower for my next book, but after Hench I wasn't feeling like it; instead I thought it might be time for another urban fantasy. I have started so many, and finished (or even caught up with) so few--the Dresden Files, for sure, and the Kelly Meding might be the only one. I find a lot of them appealing in the abstract, but it seems like they appeal to my wife more, so she's the one who reads then, gets hooked on the series, stays caught up, buys them in hardcover, etc. She has always been more of a fan of romance, and a lot of the female-authored urban fantasy seems like it's on a spectrum to paranormal romance. (The main difference, of course, is probably whether there's a single continuing protagonist, or a different romantic pairing every book.) Anyway, I'm in the middle of a lot of series, and it seems to take a lot to get me to the state where I get hooked and have to start reading them faster, so it can be years between books for me.

Patricia Briggs has, like many, split off a side series--her main series follows Mercedes "Mercy" Thompson, but there's also a "Charles & Anna" series which crosses over, and after the last Mercy Thompson book (Bone Crossed) left me a little underwhelmed, I had started those books, so the last Briggs I read was actually side series novel Cry Wolf. Apparently reading them in alternation is not a bad idea anyway, so I went back to Mercy for this one. I even remembered most of the characters, or at least was satisfied with the author's descriptions of them (a lot of minor werewolf pack members showed up, and I couldn't tell you for sure which ones we'd seen before or had character traits before this book).

The pacing was a little weird--there's basically three plot threads which show up at different times, which aren't really connected causally but do interact with each other, and the balance doesn't always work (like pack politics dominating everything else for a few chapters until we get back to our other plots), but it was better than Bone Crossed, at least. It's unfortunate, given how much urban fantasy I read, how little I enjoy the dominance politics of werewolf packs, and particularly the touchiness of Alphas. (Oh, no, we can't meet their gaze or undermine their authority or it's a challenge and they'll have to kill us. And they can't show any weakness or others will try to kill them.)

Next book in the series will be back to Charles & Anna, anyway. I am not yet really hooked on the series, but I'll keep going for now.

Lois McMaster Bujold: Komarr, completed March 22

Back to the Vorkosigans again, for Komarr. Like her other planet-named books, it takes place entirely on the planet in question (if we allow space stations in the same system to be close enough, anyway), the troubled vassal of Barrayar. Because the only current access to Barrayar comes through a wormhole in the Komarr system, and the earlier Cetagandan invasion of the planet was abetted by the Komarrans, Barrayar ended up conquering Komarr to secure its interface to the rest of the world. (I always wondered if it was only upon conquest of a second planet that Barrayar became a true empire, but I think they had emperors before that so probably not.) They've tried to be benevolent rulers since then, but we already saw in Brothers In Arms that there are those, like Ser Galen, that want to get rid of the Barrayaran yoke. And Aral Vorkosigan acquired the sobriquet of "The Butcher of Komarr" when a group of prisoners in his custody were executed--supposedly on his orders, but in fact it was an overzealous subordinate who Aral later killed.

Miles comes along to investigate a bizarre act of destruction--accident or sabotage, we don't yet know--where the "soletta array", a group of orbiting mirrors reflecting additional sunlight onto the cold, still-being-terraformed world (the world's population still lives in domed cities), has been damaged through collision with an off-course ship. He's mostly just shadowing older Lord Auditor Vorthys, the engineering professor who's analyzing the debris, and they end up staying over with Vorthys's niece Ekaterin Vorsoisson, who is our other viewpoint character in the book. Ekaterin has a highly unsympathetic husband, Tien, who has a secret shame, a hidden genetic disease called Vorzohn's Dystrophy. He also happens to be in charge of a small department of the terraforming effort.

I guess my biggest problem with this book is just that Tien and his department turn out to be directly related to the soletta disaster. I mean, think of it--the disaster happens, and an auditor is sent to investigate it. If it hadn't happened to be someone connected to Tien, the investigation might have gone nowhere, or taken a lot longer, because they wouldn't have had that extremely gratuitous link. It bugs me every time.

So the best part of the book is probably the introduction of Ekaterin, and her growth as a character through to the end of the book, where she strikes a decisive blow. And without it, we wouldn't have A Civil Campaign (or would, at least, have a much different book). But it is a dip in what would otherwise be a five-star run from Mirror Dance.

Shaun Barger: Mage Against The Machine, completed March 27

Catchy title, eh? That's probably part of why I picked it up in the first place, though I don't remember for sure. This is in my actual "trying a new author" slot, generally with permission to give up if the book doesn't grab me.

Essentially, it seems that the world ended at some point (2020?) when the machines/AIs rose up against the humans. The mages, who had been living in secret veiled communities for centuries, were hidden and thus not affected by this, though they're pretty sure that the humans were all wiped out. At least, that's what Nikolai, a young magically-talented officer (with a traumatic past) in the year 2120, has always been told.

Meanwhile, outside the veil, a young human cybernetically-enhanced woman named Jem, who remembers the machine uprising ten years earlier (she has her own tramatic past), and who mostly escaped because they were on the way to a colony on Venus at the time, is working as a courier, escorting a rare pregnant woman (unaffected by the fertility plagues the machines spread) through the fringes of Philadelphia.

The two stories go back and forth for several chapters in what seems like an attempt to sow confusion in the reader about the inconsistencies between the two versions of the timeline, which mostly led me to conclude that either these are literally parallel worlds, or that the mages are severely misinformed about the last century of history outside the veils. Or, presumably, most of them are misinformed but the ones at the top are all in on it and keeping the secret for their own reasons.

It seems like a bit of a hodgepodge. Part The Matrix, part Harry Potter (the mages have a sport named "flyball" that seems a lot of like Quidditch without broomsticks), part Brandon Sanderson/Brent Weeks (the flavour of the actual magic system), part Children of Men, part Wool (for the sheltered society ignorant of the world outside)… But I guess that means it's not too derivative, because of the variety of sources?

The biggest problem with it, really, is that the story clearly is not finished…but, in the five years since its release, no further books have come out. The author still seems to be actively posting on Instagram, and I found a Reddit post which said that as of two years ago the sequel was finished (and apparently there are supposed to be four books total), so I hazard a guess that the roadblocks are publishing-related. Like, his editor, Navah Wolfe, bought the first book for Saga Press, but moved on, so he might be editorially orphaned, leading to Saga passing on later books, so he'd have to be looking for a new publisher, or giving up and self-publishing (or just giving up). Always awkward--ask my wife who has two self-published sequels to the books that Scholastic published twenty-some years ago, because no other publisher would take them without rights to the first two. (Diana Rowland managed it somehow, but mostly it just doesn't work.) So I may hang on to this one and await further news (which presumably he'd post on Instagram or something…)

Ben Aaronovitch: Whispers Under Ground, completed March 31

Most of the urban fantasy series out there had female authors and female protagonists; I tend to call this the "post-Buffy" wave--before that, it felt like "urban fantasy" was more like Charles de Lint, with people in and around cities coming into contact with fairies and the like. Although stuff like Tanya Huff's "Blood Ties" series was also around back then, and that's clearly very close to what we call urban fantasy these days. Anyway. There are a few male authors as well, Jim Butcher the most famous, and Kevin Hearne, but they have a different flavour to them. And then there's Ben Aaronovitch, which is different again, being very British. Which is all just a way of saying that, while I normally try not to read too-similar books too close together, this doesn't really feel very much like the Patricia Briggs book I read a couple of weeks ago.

I'm a bit behind on this series--I read Midnight Riot (the North American retitled version of Rivers of London) some time ago, and Moon Over Soho more recently but still a while ago. But my wife was just reading the latest, Amongst Our Weapons, from the library, and apparently it's full of Monty Python references (in the chapter titles, if nothing else), and my eldest son was just reading Midnight Riot (apparently he'd heard that this series's magic system is vaguely similar to the system from the Ars Magica RPG we've been playing recently), so it felt like time to revisit it. My memory is of course a little fuzzy, but my overall impression is that this book is a little more police-procedural murder mystery than the previous two. Definitely there is a murder to solve, and there is a lot of interaction with other police (and an American FBI agent). Definitely a certain amount of underground (including sewers), as the title implies (so it's not just the London Underground). I enjoyed it and will have to try to revisit the series a little more frequently.

And that's it for the prose fiction books for March. For completeness I can also add in a graphic novel I squeezed in (literally just finished it before midnight on the 31st). See, one of the podcasts I've been listening to for a while is the "Endless" podcast, about the Sandman, cohosted by Lani Diane Rich and Alisa Kwitney. Kwitney, who was a former DC editor, particularly on Sandman itself, also apparently did a series for Ahoy Comics called "G.I.L.T.", which they were shilling on the podcast, so I thought I'd give it a try. I got my library to order what turned out to be a collection of the first five issues (I guess I'm not sure if there are more, but I wouldn't be surprised). "G.I.L.T." apparently stands for something like "Guild of Independent Lady Temporalists", though I'm not sure such a guild actually turned up… Anyway, two women, 70ish Hildy and 50ish Trista, get sent back in time to 1973, though Trista wasn't supposed to come along; they try to deal with their respective pasts, linked by a creepy cult-leader type that Hildy was engaged to and Trista's mother was a follower of. They're not supposed to be able to change anything, but they're also not supposed to both go back at once, so things get a little screwy. I wasn't 100% sold on it, but it was interesting.

And now I am actually reading The Raven Tower, but that'll be for next month's post.

#Lois McMaster Bujold #Vorkosigan #Ben Aaronovich #Patricia Briggs #Steven Barnes #Shaun Barger #Natalie Zina Walchots #Jeffrey Cranor #Janina Matthewson #Within The Wires #books #reading #Alisa Kwitney

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bendy-and-buddies · 1 year

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To celebrate the Dark Revival... we uncovered something sitting in the archives for quite some time.

This is a script. One for a special that was apparently slotted to be released in the month of April originally. That was all that could be discerned from the documents, what year in specific is still lost. There are even a select number of characters exclusive to this script who appear nowhere else across the Bendy IP prior to the 1990s.

((short version: Here's an "April Fools special" that's been a low effort WIP script for a long, long, LONG time. Enjoy the crack.))

DUE TO THE OUTLANDISHLY VAST FAN-DEMAND, BENDY AND BUDDIES IS NOW PERMANANTLY CHANGED TO SUIT THE HIGH DEMANDS YOU BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE HAVE ALWAYS WANTED! SO PLEASE ENJOY THE NEW, AND IMPROVED, BENDY AND BUDDIES AND THE INK MACHINE ADVENTURES!!!

[Bendy and Buddies and Etc. is filmed in front of a fictional studio audience.]

Angie; “Bendy! I was hoping that the both of us could visit the beach once more, mayhap we can bring the others as well?”

Bendy; “Ah, sure Anj! Sounds like it’d be fu-“

(Alice walk in and puts her arms around Bendy, very deliberately having his head near her breasts. Cue sitcom audience cheers as Alice enters.)

Alice; “Ohhh, but Bendy just promised to take me out for a date! So sorry, maybe he can play little games with you some other time, sweetums~?”

Bendy; “Alice, c’mon! she was inviting all of us! She wasn’t excluding you on purpose or something, right?”

Angie; “Um... yes, of course she may accompany us! I do not see why Alice canno-”

(Alice and Bendy make quick confused noises at Angie’s response before resuming.)

Alice; “Oh, of course! It is just like privileged little you to try and take Bendy all for yourself! Sorry airhead, but Bendy is far too grown up for a childish little girly-girl like you! A handsome devil like this deserves a real woman like me!”

(bouncy sound effects to imply her boobs are flopping around.)

Angie; “But, Lady Alice, I never intended-!”

Bendy; (anxiously, under his breath) “Anj, just grab my arm!”

(Angie tries to reason peacefully until Bendy gestures her to grab hold of one of his arms. Alice has his other arm in the usual love-triangle tug-of-war scenario/trope. Angie looks less “grumpy” and more uncomfortable)

Bendy; “Ladies, ladies! Please, there’s plenty of the Devil Darling to go around!”

Angie; “You are in samples??”

(Bendy’s surprised, laughs a bit and is about to correct her until Alice cuts in again)

Alice; “It’s an expression, nitwit! See Bendy? Why bother with this Dumb Dora, when you can have a Darlin Dame~?”

(Angie is saddened by the persistent bullying from Alice’s end)

Bendy; (angrily to Alice, under his breath again) “You’re not helpi-!”

(cut to Boris nearby with a banjo)

Boris; “Gee wiz Bendy, quite the heartbreaker lately aren’cha?”

Bendy; (dramatically) “it’s my devilish charms, I can’t help it!”

Boris; “One’a these days it’s gonna be yer downfall, attracting so many-“

(Sammy shows up the hell out of nowhere.)

Sammy; “Wonderful Lord Bendy! Let me sniff your holy panties!”

Boris: “Well, if it isn’t that super-wacky Sammy! The head of the Music Department who has no note-worthy character outside of blindly worshiping Bendy! He was never a toon like us, but… um, guess he’s here anyway! Hooray!”

Sammy; “insert anime joke here!”

Bendy; (in pure dread) “Oh no-“

(And now Wally shows up, also the hell out of nowhere.)

Wally; “Regardless of how Bendy’s lovelife goes, if it makes another damn tidal wave of a mess I gotta clean up: I’M OUTTA HERE!”

(stupid laughtracks playing)

Alice; “He said the catchphrase!”

Bendy; “Wally the Janitor is just hilarious in everything he pops up in, right everyone!?”

Boris; “Sponsored by the following companies listed.” (onscreen there’s several of the in-universe businesses in the canon-verse. Maybe throw in a reference to other fictitious companies? Acme is a definite one to add.)

Bendy; “Actually, Alice… I don’t think you really specified where you wanted to have that date anyway, where were you thinking?”

Alice; “Oh, I thought you’d never ask, my Widdle Debil! Infact, I want all of you to come with, please do follow your angel!”

Bendy and Boris; (failing to see how suspicious that was) “Sounds good to me!”

As Bendy, Boris and Sammy obediently follow Alice, Angie is called by someone else off-screen the opposite way.

Angie; “Wait, what was that?”

(murmured gibberish a’la Peanuts is heard)

Angie; “Oh um, alright then.”

(The ‘gang’, sans Angie, arrive at Joey Drew Studios. I’ll prolly just take a photo of whatever animation studio or old building from google and slap the JDS logo on top of it. Laziness!)

Alice; “And here we are!”

Bendy; “Uhh… Alice??”

Boris; “Isn’t this the old studio?... Y’know, as in that place where all of us experienced terrible, traumatic pasts involving human experimentation and brutal ritualistic sacrifices that’ve left us all emotionally and mentally scared forever and other dark, gruesome things like that?”

(Bendy is a little taken aback by Boris’ detailed description.)

Bendy; “… Yeah… I thought we all vowed to never come back here…? Wasn’t finally getting out a highly triumphant moment for us or something?”

Sammy; “Lord Bendy, your buttocks is scrumptious like hamburgers!”

Alice; “Oh, I assure you! I have very good reasons for why I chose to take you all here! I have one… no, TWO very important things I’ve needed to show you all for a long time!”

Bendy; “Only now this has been brought up??”

Alice; “both are a lot to take in, but I need you to trust me… do you doubt your angel~?”

Bendy; “Ahh… fine then.”

Boris; “I’m ready for anything.”

(Alice looks up and calls to someone)

Alice; “Alright deary-pie, you can come out now!”

(stupid dramatic sound effects as the apparent newcomer is revealed)

Geno-Fur; “Hello, everyone!! It’s me, Geno-Fur!!”

Sudden Narrator; “Thaaaat’s right! It’s Geno-Fur the DemonAngel, the most powerful cartoon character in all of Toon Town! The perky, talented daughter of Bendy the Demon and Alice Angel with the help of the Ink Machine, this cute toon angel demon girl has an inner inky darkness unlike any other! She’s oh-so deep, mysterious and meaningful everyone!”

Bendy; (more and more like he’s reading it off a script) “Oh my Satan! Alice, we have a long-lost daughter who is beautiful and an objectively perfect and wonderful blend of who we both are! And will probably easily surpass us in popularity! If I had known we had such a blessing who totally didn’t just fall out of the sky, I would have dropped everything, married you and center my entire life around you both!

Sammy; “Praise be unto the blessed firstborn!”

(Boris is bug-eyed, genuinely dumbfounded by what is happening before him)

Boris; “UM…??”

Geno-Fur; “OMG! Mommy, Daddy, thank you so much! You even brought my husband here to see me!

(Geno-Fur hugs Boris hard enough to pop his spine, he’s in pain. “CAN’T… B-BREATHE-!!” his poor banjo has snapped in two. To Boris’ luck, Geno-Fur releases him.)

Bendy; (zero effort on his part) “Don’t go breakin’ my princess’s heart, Boris…”

Alice; “I love beautiful reunions!”

Sammy; “I shall always be a loyal, faithful Side-Hoe willing to pleasure you, your Queen, and your glorious child, my Lord!”

Boris; “Guys, none of this is in my copy of the script, what’s going on?!?”

Alice; “I’ll gladly answer that! What’s going on is my second reason…”

(Alice wipes the side of her face to reveal the same gross Scarface thing going on with Susie-Alice. Shock Horror, she’s also Susie-Alice.)

Alice: “As it turns out, I’m still not near as perfect as I’d like to be!! AH-HAHAHA!”

(Alice cackles evilly as she grabs Boris and drags him into the building. Yes, exactly like the end of Chapter 3.)

Boris; (As he’s spirited away) “WHAAAAAT THEEEEE HAYSTAAACK!?....”

Bendy; “What!? Oh god, Boris!! Hang on buddy, I’m coming!”

(a panicking Bendy runs in to rescue Boris, Sammy and Geno-Fur follow)

Sammy; “M’Lawd! I will follow you to the ends of the earth!”

Geno-Fur; “Mommy!! Daddy!! Why can’t we settle this like normal people!?”

(Bendy is desperately trudging into the studio, unknowingly he is very slowly melting into his monster-form we are all familiar with as he becomes exhausted)

Bendy; “Boris, please hang on!! I’m coming...!! .. Augh… Maybe… Maybe I should hit the gym? NO!! No, I’m fine!! Goddamned fine!! I just gotta… Gotta keep going… Wait, wait… why is my sweat this… thick and… dark?”

(Bendy’s then surprised upon overhearing something, looking to the side to find Henry somewhere in the distance and humming to himself- probably doing one of the Chapter 3 tasks)

Henry; “Joey Drew he likes big fingers in his ass, Joey Drew he likes big fingers in his ass, fingers in his ass, he likes in his-” (yes. It’s that meme. I have zero shame.)

(Bendy slowly becomes angered)

Bendy; “Henry… Henry!!”

(this gets Henry’s startled attention. As Bendy rants he slowly completes his transformation into Monster-Bendy.)

Bendy; “My old, actual for-real creator, Henry… You left everyone… You left ME! Why didn’t you stay!? Was I just a mistake to you, blaming me for everything Joey did!? Why didn’t you love me, Henry!? Was I never good enough for you!? You LIED to us!! You never stopped Joey from all of the atrocities he committed!! You never came back!! You never played catch with me and called me ‘Sport’!! You never threw me a Birthday!! YOU NEVER BOUGHT ME A HAPPY MEAL!!!”

Henry; “Oh gosh!”

(Henry zooms away as fast as he can, his warped and enraged cartoon-demon son giving chase. Suddenly Geno-Fur to the oh-so convenient rescue.)

Geno-Fur; “Oh my god, daddy!! Izzat you?? Ohmygaww I can see why mommy thot u wer hawt!!”

(Bendy is understandably confused by her appearance and comment.)

Bendy; “huh…what??”

(he looks back to where Henry was initially, however Henry’s already in a miracle station also conveniently nearby)

Bendy; “HE’S GONE!! Where did he-!?”

Geno-Fur; “Ummm like… you know that weird up-and-down door and room thingy with buttons??”

Bendy; (surprised at how goddamn stupid she is) “The… you mean the elevator?”

Geno-Fur; “Yeah!! The escalator! I think Henry’s using it to go down to liiiiike… Level 1000!”

Bendy; “…There is no Level 1000. The building doesn’t tunnel down THAT deep.”

Geno-Fur; “Exactly!! Like, he’s going so deep down he’s trying to get to a level that doesn’t exist! I’m sure that if you go all the way down to the last floor, you’ll find Henry! Good luck daddykins!”

Bendy; (half-assing at this point) “Well, I totally trust my perfect hybrid daughter to never lie to me ever and that alibi is highly convincing. I will go.”

(Bendy exists the scene in his usual spooky way, to which Henry hops back out of the station.)

Geno-Fur; “Hurry Henry!! We gotta save mah Woof Hubby and get out of here!! And bring mommy and daddy back with the power of family love!!”

(Geno-Fur tearfully exists, Henry following her.)

Henry; “This is what I got out of retirement for…”

(Cut to Alice’s super-duper evil lab room with Boris strapped to the operating table Frankenstein style. Alice is still acting in-character, in contrast Boris is basically left to ad-lib and isn’t entirely certain on the mood of the scene. Boris scratches at his neck, but quickly puts his arm back in as soon as he realizes they’re rolling.)

Alice; (some obligatory evil chuckling) “… And after I’ve done away with you, Henry AND Bendy, I can continue my makeover with no trouble or interruptions at all! Then I will have the popularity I was always destined for! Now, any last words before you fulfil your purpose, little wolfie~?”

Boris; “is it too early to make a ‘stole my heart’ joke, even though you got the REAL side-splitters, or...?”

(some muffled laughter off-stage is heard, implied to be Rodney behind the camera. Alice is unamused and gestures at Boris threateningly.)

Alice; “Be quiet or I’ll cut you open faster.”

Boris; “Alright, alright, I’ll shush…”

The “mysterious” voice who may or may not be Rodney; “Bitter hag-”

(because of budgetary, technical, and time-related issues… we already skip over to chapter 4 events because we’re basically haphazardly trying to scrunch in the entire canon-game story, not caring if it makes any sense at all like always)

Henry; “Okay, so it’s only now occurred to me to ask; earlier, we were in the show… but as we kept going, all of a sudden we’re in the-?”

Geno-Fur; “YAWN! You’re boring old-man dinosaur talk is super boring, we’re not gonna rescue Boris fast enough if you don’t let me do all of the mouth-stuff! No wonder mommy and daddy wanna murder-fy you, LOL!”

Henry; “I… I don’t even- what the heck is a ‘LOL’, anyway!? Why are you helping me if you’re their daughter or something!?”

Geno-Fur; “Because I’m sooo nice!! :3”

Henry; “How… how do you even work??”

(The Butcher Gang mooks appear right the hell out of nowhere without Henry even opening any of the doors)

Charley; (in a grunty, zombie-ish way) “Now’s are time to shine, boys… Lets take all of our pent-up frustrations out on Henry!”

Geno-Fur; “OOOOOH MY GOOOOOOOD!!! SOOOO KAWAII! THESE GUYS ARE SOOO MY HUSBANDS!”

(she hugs all three up to her tumour-tits, immediately all their necks snap.)

Henry: (not even caring anymore) “I thought you said Boris was your husband.”

Geno-Fur; “Ummm, DUH? Of course, he is! You’ve clearly not been listening to me with your senile old-ness! Seriously, I thought the guy who drew ME would be super-hot and NOT some old BOOMER! Isn’t that right, husbands!?”

(she only now realises the 3 are dead and lets out a big Darth Vader “NOOOO!!!”, Henry is unfazed.)

(Meanwhile, back at Bendy’s Ink Machine throne room - Bendy was able to hear Geno-Fur’s annoying whine from several of those miles upwards)

Bendy; “the hell…? Ugh… probably my cue… A guy just can’t watch his own show on loop in peace anymore…”

(as Bendy speaks he’s existing his “castle” to return to the higher levels. Sammy abruptly appears again in one of the hallways Bendy passes.)

Sammy; “My Lord! I will always be gleeful and willing to perform any request you-!”

(Bendy, not even making eye-contact, clocks Sammy in the head with his “good toon hand” hard enough to put the walking notice-me-senpai-joke out cold, the sound effect a wet and loud POW. Mr Lawrence is unconscious. And maybe missing some teeth.)

Bendy; “Fuckin’ punchline…”

(Cut back to Henry and Geno-Fur at the carnival prototype area. The poor old man is being ranted at by the annoying Mary Sue disaster for killing her 3 other “husbands”. Even though that was her own fault.)

Geno-Fur; “Those valiant gentle-mans meant the world to me and now they’re all gross inky poopy-goop!! This is all YOUR fault, you ugly old murderer-guy, you!! Feel guilty for your evil sins!!”

Henry; “I never even touched them; YOU did that! Please tell me, are you some kinda alien who is trying to mimic what a toon looks and acts like? Because you’re failing miserably.”

Geno-Fur; “I’m young and pretty and you’re a wrinkly old fart!! That means I’m right and you’re wrong!!”

(Henry groans in annoyance, pinching the bridge of his nose)

Henry; “Alright then… Seeing as I’m clearly a hindrance to your ‘noble quest’ or… whatever, how’s about this: you go ahead and complete all of the puzzles needed to unlock the doors, while I search for any clues or another alternate route that could maybe get us into that haunted house faster? I mean, clearly, it’d be my only good contribution to your ‘mission’.”

Geno-Fur; “Pfff, I have a better idea! I’ll go ahead and complete all the puzzles needed to unlock the doors, while YOU search for any clues or another alternate route that could maybe get us into that haunted house faster! I mean, clearly, it’d be your only good contribution to my mission!”

(As Geno-Fur sneers she walks to the puzzle-room that has Norman in it, Henry has an expression that all but states he wants to see this obnoxious girl get hit by a truck.)

Henry; “You…go do that.”

Geno-Fur; “YAS! And I’ma doit like a sexy QUEEN~!!”

(As she enters the door shuts behind her, trapping her there until the task would be completed.)

Henry; “Okay then… Better think of something before she gets back. I can only put up with that rotten attitude for so long…”

(Before Henry knew it, he now hears several sounds indicative of clutter and a chase as he sadly must hear Geno-Fur’s voice once more, although muffled through the walls and corridors… There are gradually more muffled sounds of disaster around him, almost impossibly so as Geno-Fur’s whining can be heard amongst it. Sounds range from explosions, to car horns and all the way to an elephant. Henry is utterly lost.)

Henry; “What the devil is that brat doing!?”

(as soon as the noise dies down finally, all the doors and puzzles have spontaneously been completed. Whatever Geno-Fur caused in there, it finished everything for him.)

Henry; “Wait, already?... Huh, that screechy rat-girl helped with progress for once…”

(Not wasting any time, Henry hops into the attraction and heads towards one of the carts on the track. Extra sound-effects/in-game audio to indicate the ride starts, as Henry is slowly carted through the tunnel-portion the intercom is switched on, it’s Boris and Susie-Alice mid-conversation. Alice sounds angered with a reasonable Boris.)

Boris; “-I’m just saying, you weren’t part of Henry’s initial vision when making this show, and that isn’t a bad thing! I mean, Lola got popular after Space Jam-“

Susie-Alice; “And popular with who, exactly!? A bunch of perverts who don’t care about character! But as soon as I make it to the big top, the world will know I’m appealing in mind AND sexuality! So, what if I was Joey’s add-on!? I was the best thing to happen to you and Bendy’s sad little circus!”

Boris; “Alice, look, there’s no need to get hostile. I’ve been trying to help you and turn it around into something positive. You’re the one choosing to see it as something wrong. You’re not one of Henry’s characters like Bendy and I. That isn’t an insult, it’s what happened!”

Susie-Alice; “Well! You!... You’re just a sad, stupid mongrel who digs up bones! And your friend is a fat, gremlin slob who’ll never have anything near as wonderful as me!! How do you like that, huh!? What do have to say to that!?”

Boris; “I’d say now you’re just yelling like an angry school-kid ‘cuz you don’t have a point.”

(Henry pays no heed to the Halloween-themed pop-ups as he listens in awkwardly)

Henry; “I might’ve jumped in too soon...”

(Susie-Alice and Boris both let out surprised a “huh?”)

Henry; “Oh! Did… did you two hear me? Didn’t think it worked that way.”

Boris; “Howdy Henry! Real quick, was all’a that ruckus earlier from that Jenny-chick? Sounded like a twister full of cats was let loose in here!”

Susie-Alice; “How much did you hear!? Wait, wait!! How do you shut this off!? Can we do this over!? Make the cart stop right now! I was supposed to give a profound and depressing speech--!!”

(the intercom is abruptly cut as Alice panics, likely because she was scrambling on the buttons. Henry’s already at the “house” part of the ride with paintings and such.)

Henry; “… I’ll just tell her I only heard something about bones and gremlins.”

(As Henry is carted across the room, he comments on the environment casually)

Henry; “Wonder who did the paintings in here? I need to ask around when I can. I don’t think the poor fella ever got credit, knowing Joey’s ‘forgetfulness’… Bertrum prolly has the answer, if he’s still nearby.”

(Henry’s about to head into the dark tunnel where Boris *would* be there as a Frankenstein monster to make it stop… but no, he isn’t there. Not to any degree.)

Henry: “Uhh… ‘Oh no! what has she done to you!?’ …”

(He clears his throat, then adds more base to his voice)

Henry: “…’OH NO! what has she done to you!?’ …”

(Although Henry’s deeper into the darker portion of the ride than what was normal, his tired prayer is answered as a pair of hands latch onto the cart and force it to stop. They, however, are not Boris’ mega-hands… But Norman’s, as is indicative by what Henry can see as well as the grunts. He has removed the camera-head mask)

Henry: “… ‘Boris! What has she do-!?’ wait… wait, Nor-?”

(Norman, shrouded in shadows, cuts Henry off with a panicked “SHH!!”, then whispers...)

Norman: “Look, Hen, I’m having as hard a time to follow what’s going on as you are. I’m going to push you back and adjust the cart, so it doesn’t keep moving. This did not happen, and you never saw me!”

Henry: “Of course… Highly terrifying Ink-monster who I did not see here…”

Norman: “There we go.”

(As the not-Projectionist(?) stated, he shoved the cart back and made quick work to turn it in such a way that it wouldn’t continue onward on the track. Henry is awkwardly left alone waiting for the warped-Boris cue.)

Rodney, undoubtedly the cameraman now and in a snarky mood; “… Isn’t something supposed to happen in this clearly suspenseful climax we’ve been building up to?”

(There is a loud “BONK” sound effect as Rod is clocked on the noggin by somebody else, resulting in an annoyed “OW!! Son of a…!!” from him.)

(Susie-Alice enters the room without warning, very blatantly stalling for time with improvisations. Henry hardly reacts.)

Susie-Alice; “We meet again, Henry! You’re trapped in my web, and a little fly like you will have no chance of escape!”

Henry; “Didn’t you already use that spider-web analogy a while ago...?”

Susie-Alice; “Soon! Your face will be an analogy for all the pain and ruin you’ve done unto me which is very clearly your fault as much as Joeys’! But! Unlike your ruined face mine will be fixed and I’ll be the heavenly starlet idol I’ve always deserved to be!”

Henry; “You lost me.”

Susie-Alice; “And I’ll make you lose your head too! Literally, not figuratively!”

(she charges to him dramatically, brandishing a vase prop from the table. Henry leisurely hops out of the cart finally.)

Henry; “a cue to fight and defend myself, alrighty then...”

(Before Henry could spring into this on-the-spot “Boss Battle”, a sudden gent pipe whizzes through the air at a beeline to Susie-Alice’s head. It’s only hard enough to make her stop in her tracks with a surprised shriek and grunt to herself for a little in pain. Standing on top of the cart Henry had exited is “Allison Alice”. She’s posed dramatically and without Tom.)

“Allison”; “Please, don’t give up Henry! You’re our only hope!... Don’t know why I said that here and now, but I did…”

Henry; (fake gasp, he’s clearly getting tired) “Oh My Goodness, another Amy the Angel?”

“Allison”; “Um, it’s ‘Alice’-”

Henry; “-Dearie me, given that there have been dozens of Boris copies, does that mean there are just as many of you?”

“Allison”; “Honestly, you’ll love what I still remember about what happened to Lacie.”

(Susie moans about her brow hurting, “Allison” remembers her other lines.)

“Allison”; “OH! Uhh by the way Henry do not be deceived by this awful, evil witch! Even though I look even less like her, I’m absolutely the real and goody-good Alice Angel!”

(This accusation catches Susie-Alice’s attention, and she angrily glares daggers at her like a snobby teenaged girl who got upstaged at prom.)

Susie-Alice; “You attention-whore hussy! I’m the REAL Alice Angel!”

“Allison”; “No, I’M Alice!”

Susie-Alice; “I’m Alice Angel!”

“Allison”; “I’m Alice Angel!”

Susie-Alice; “I’m Alice Angel!”

“Allison”; “I’m Alice Angel!”

Susie-Alice; “I’m Dirty Dan!”

“Allison”; “I’m Dirty Dan!”

(they both pause)

Susie-Alice; “…Did that really just come out of our mouths-?”

(explosion and clutter noises, everyone is surprised. It’s Geno-Fur having burst into the haunted house room through the wall.)

Geno-Fur; “Shit! I was so lucky daddy saved me from that creepy camera-head guy! He could’ve grabbed my sexy butt and make it all gross with the weird ink corruption!!”

Henry; (under his breath) “Why did neither of them strangle her…”

Geno-Fur; “Mommy! Stop it! I know you’re like so much more than all this darkness and suffering! I totes forgive you for turning my woof hubby all ugly, because I know we can all fix and love him together! You don’t have to stab anything! You nurtured me and made me the proud, talented, and strong woman I am today!”

“Allison”; “… are you talking to her or me??”

Geno-Fur; “Yes!!”

(Monster-Bendy’s signature Ink Aura seeps into the room as he suddenly approaches. Oh, the suspense!)

Henry, actually surprised by this; “Wait a minute, already?? How did he know to come right here!?”

Henry, now grumpily; “... It was that pea-brained banshee, wasn’t it. All of that obnoxious wailing lured him to us!”

Geno-Fur; “Shuttup! I’m legit the reason anything good happened here!!”

Henry, rolling his eyes; “Oh yeah. Sure…”

(Boris… Oh Sorry I mean Franken-Boris, finally enters the scene… however everyone is still talking, and he just stands there in the back awkwardly now that any room for his cue to start the monster act is completely null with the current cast ensemble. Once more, none of what is now transpiring was in his copy of the script. He’d be whistling and twiddling his “thumbs” if they weren’t so massive and heavy now.)

Monster-Bendy, finally; “Well, I for one can’t wait to make... Whatever her name is stay quiet ONCE AND FOR ALL! But first things first, my bloody and graphic vengeance on HENRY!”

Susie-Alice; “HEY! Wait your turn, fatty! I’m having vengeance on him FIRST!”

Monster-Bendy; “THE FUCK YOU JUST CALL ME!? FINE THEN, MY VENGENCE IS ON EVERY PATHETIC SOUL IN THIS ROOM!”

“Allison”; “I was supposed to get Hen out of here by now??”

Geno-Fur; “DADDYYYYYY! NUUUUUUU! LEMME TOK 2 U!!”

Monster-Bendy; “WHAT!?”

Geno-Fur; “Plz, DADDY!

Monster-Bendy; “I heard you the first time-”

Geno-Fur; “If you’re not able to look within your heart and see that this isn’t what you want…

Monster-Bendy; “Sweet Solomon, what am I in for.”

Geno-Fur; “I wrote a song, which was 100% not originally by Christina Aguilera, JUST for you about how killing the people you love is wrong, and that I’m your best daughter ever AND LOVE YOU no matter what! It’s really dope and super cooler than what happened in Goofy Movie and I practiced all of the Fortnight dances and Minecraft stuff for it that I put it to and EVERYTHING! Duncha remember you n mommys wedding?? It was super bomb and I was the best gothic flowergirl in fishnets, leather skirt, midnight black corset and red firey boots EVER! Jus remember all de times we were like the best sexiest fam in da WORLD! And after it’s all done, I can play fnaf games with you! And then later, we’ll have another episode where I’m in highschool and Boris-sempai meets me under the cherry-blossom trees and I made him been-toes n’ stuff, and we’re the best OTP ever and Romeo and Juliet could never hope to compare to how deep we got it! And then in the final season it’ll be revealed yer in love with Uncle Cuphead and mommy is all like-!”

Bendy is slack jawed at this stupidity. He finally snaps.

Bendy; “F-… Fortnight and..? Did I hear that? Stop the cameras. Hit the brakes. Back up the bus. STOP THE GODDAMN MUSIC! Listen, I’ve put up with a LOT of braindead pandering malarkey this episode, but shit like FORTNITE REFERENCES and other media where they don’t belong are where I’m drawing the damn line. That tears it! I’m leaving! I don’t give a shit about getting a check anymore! I have a cat to feed and play with back at home, and I’m not wasting anymore time or energy on this! I’VE HAD IT WITH THIS TRIPE!!”

As Bendy rants, he’s removing his huge monster-self costume. Boris struggles out of the fat-suit and discards the gigantic gloves, whipping one of the X’s off his eyelids. They were makeup.

Boris; “I’m right there with you, Bend. I didn’t spend three years religiously studying musical theatre and drama to be in this piece of cow dung!”

“Allison” removes her wig to reveal it’s been Maria the whole time, because the real Allison wanted no part in this.

Maria; “Personally I’d of taken so many fat ones to stay OUT of the camera.”

Boris; “...’Many fat’ what??”

Maria; “I’ll… say when we’re older!”

Boris; “Mari, all of us are presumed 20-somethings-“

Rodney, finally visible as he’s approaching the set: “Rufford could fart on paper, and that’d be better material than this slop.”

Boris; “Who’s to say he isn’t one of the prime suspects? I mean, if it wasn’t Mr. Drew, or Raph-”

Bendy; “I just remembered, where the Blue Hell’s Angie!? She straight-up VANISHED in the middle of act 1!”

Angie, muffled; “Um, I am in here!”

They all look to a wooden box nearby. Boris pries it open to reveal Angie squeezed within.

Angie; “Hello, my friends!”

Bendy; “Anj!”

Angie; “I was informed that this would be my best contribution to the project...”

Boris; “… Wait, why put Angie into one of the crates I was s’posed to SMASH to bits, according to my script copy?”

(Geno-Fur interrupts like always)

Geno-Fur; “NnnnnOOOO!!! You can’t leave now! It was getting soooo gooooood!! I WANT TO SPREAD THE FEELS OF MY FEELS SPEECH!!”

Bendy; “SHADDAP, you obnoxious personification of preteen fanfiction and anime-base art!! C’mon outta there Angie, Henry promised to take us out for donuts after this.”

Angie, freed from the crate; “Oh, lovely!”

Boris; “I call dibs on the first bear claw.”

Maria; “Oh, I can absolutely go for a cream-filling!”

Bendy; “Maria, just.. don’t..”

Alice, trying to get Maria’s attention but ultimately ignored; “Why did the pipe you throw at me SMELL ‘funny’!?”

Dolly enters, just as frustrated about this dumb performance as everybody else.

Dolly; “Ages and ages on EVERYONE’S makeup, and do I get any mention on the end-credits? When I looked them over, NO.”

Rodney, chiming in; “Damn good for a first shot at horror-film sorta faceups, if ya ask me.”

Dolly; “Aw, you!”

Bendy; “Yeah, you got an artists’ hand Dolly! I remember Boris and I having a double-take at how well you captured Alice’s inner evil.”

Dolly; “Spoiling me, every single one of you”

(distant sound of Alice grunting grumpily and walking away from the group.)

Norman, somewhere in the distance: “Let’s just wrap this up and go home everybody, Joey can get his ears hollered off later!”

Bertrum, further away: “MY SCENES WERE SKIPPED OVER ALTOGETHER! THE NERVE OF WHOEVER PLITHERED OUT THIS PIGS’ EXREMENT…!!”

(Various voices are heard as the entire crew dissipates. Improv whatever.)

Henry returns to the remaining “toon crew”, holding a set of car keys

Henry; “Ima’s offered to tag along and pitch in, donuts are our treat fellas!”

Bendy, Angie, Boris, and company (not counting Alice or Geno-Fur) cheer in delight as they follow Henry out to grab some good old Shipley’s. Although still close by, the metaphorical camera is on the lady-trio. They momentarily face the audience.

Dolly; “Just to clarify, none of that hogwash we trudged through is canon.”

Angie; “We still hope you were entertained, thank you dearly for coming!”

Maria, after blowing a kiss; “Goodnight, everybody!”

END.

#kind of a long read even if lazy so be ready #Happy November Fools #might add other scribly drawings later just so it's not JUST the crappy base edits of (spoiler)

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