Roundup

[jaggedwolf]

Critical Role

Watched the first half of the latest episode. I unexpectedly got some fodder for the fic I'm currently writing, which was nice.

You could hear a pin drop when Jester said she knew why Beau was avoiding her...and then it had nothing to do with the crush, and everything to do with Beau's almost deaths and Jester casting Sending to mess with Beau's dads. Wonderful, and every time I see someone go on a spiel about how Problematic TM Jester's behaviour is I just laugh because, yes, that's the point? She has a poor sense of boundaries and constantly oversteps, I don't know how people seem to think Laura doesn't know how she's playing. It's all clearly intentional.

I really appreciated their discussion on Molly too - that Beau may carry around a reminder of him everywhere, but she's not pedestalizing or pretending he's perfect. It's also interesting to see what Beau and Jester's friendship is like now, where they're more willing to contradict each other, but not unkindly. I remember in the early days it seemed like they'd never disagree on anything too important, that these stumbly disagreements have been better at building their connection.

That Astrid and Caleb conversation, phew. I like Astrid now. She's so very sorry for Caleb and she's accepted the deal she's made and the costs of her rewards. That's a far more interesting reaction that simple anger or dismissiveness. Much harder for Caleb to dismiss in turn as well, I suspect.

Homestuck Epilogues

Since I started read the comic last year because I was home sick with a sore throat, I decided missing the first day of work due to yet another sore throat meant that the only appropriate reaction was similar. Ooof, what a ride. I understand why they were controversial in fandom, but there were lots of character bits I found fascinating.

...Gamzee continues to distress me, however, and I don't think that'll ever change.

With Meat, I mostly wanted Dirk to lose. With Candy, it was generally depressing overall, in a way where you want people to snap out of their routines and figure out the right thing to do. I think with Candy I had expected Trickster Mode shenanigans, so it coming down to regular human (or troll) foibles hit harder.

I enjoyed the Rose/Kanaya and Dave/Karkat shippy bits. I wish Rose had a bit more agency before she fully succumbed in Meat, but I loved Kanaya's reaction to all that nonsense, from Dirk successfully messing with her narrative to that furious spiel when she realised what's happened. She's gonna go rescue her wife! Kanaya getting angry is pleasing in general. Rose finding a happiness she never thought she'd have in Candy was also sweet (pun unintended), canon-relevancy be damned. (I cannot believe they both agreed to name their kid Vriska though, omfg. I will file that under the same "I don't understand" folder as Vriska's presence magically solving Rose's alcohol problems on the meteor tbh.)

Dave/Karkat were painful in different ways in both timelines. Dirk being a creepy little fucker in Meat and tainting it in that way, and in Candy, that impasse that never got resolved. Gah. I really liked Dave and Roxy's conversation on coming out and Roxy's worry about feeling greedy about coming out for different things - there's a very cute paragraph there where Dave simply looks at Karkat, and Roxy's PoV seemed pretty real.

In general, those couple of differences in gender identity and sexuality across timelines didn't really bother me. I don't want to say it made sense, because no differences also would have made sense, but given the difference in lives lived, I wasn't too jarred.

Side-note: I can't believe Obama, or at least AI Obama is now a Homestuck character. I cracked up so much. He may have slept with Dirk??

John is pretty depressed in both timelines, but I'm glad Candy!John gets the chance to figure some shit out.

Is there going to be more Epilogues? Is the mysterious Homestuck 2 I've heard about the more Epilogues? I will find that out later, I still have various parts of Homestuck canon to peruse.

Fandom Work Recs

Quiz: What Character From "The Penumbra Podcast" Are You? - I got Juno, which feels like a bit of a roast

Art: Honk - If nothing else, this continued Hugos-AO3 wank has given us so much great art/fic.

Linkspam

Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain By Jamil Jan Kochai, and the accompanying interview

Your father is a dark, sturdy man, and so unlike you that, as a child, you were sure that one day Hagrid would come to your door and inform you of your status as a Mudblood, and then your true life—the life without the weight of your father’s history, pain, guilt, hopelessness, helplessness, judgment, and shame—would begin.

The Asian-American Canon Breakers

Part of the reason “The Woman Warrior” was so palatable to mainstream readers was that it could be read as a story of the traumas associated with immigrant assimilation. Perhaps these wounds might even compel a young woman to retreat into folktales, to rewrite odes of the distant past. Family bonds, the psychology of immigrant households, estrangement from the mother tongue: these became the defining themes of Asian-American literature, in part because they were market-tested.

Science Fiction’s Wonderful Mistakes

From the mid-1920s, when Hugo Gernsback coined the term “science fiction,” several fallacies became associated with the increasingly vigorous commercial genre and never entirely went away. The first was the “Taught Me Science Fallacy,” which goes something like this: Isaac Asimov writes about science and particle physics, so if I read the Foundation trilogy, I might learn what a neutrino is.

Can monoculture survive the algorithm?

Instead of worrying about the loss of monoculture, I’m more concerned that there isn’t enough room for products or projects (or even places) that are not memes, that aren’t pre-optimized for sharing or scaling. In the end I fall more on Scorsese’s side of the argument, though I wouldn’t wish for any more Scorsese: The non-homogenized alternatives to the mainstream become harder and harder to find. As we grow more accustomed to the algorithmic monoculture, allowing it to occupy our senses, we might lose our understanding of, or our taste for, anything else.

That last article was interesting because firstly, that chart's an interesting way to consider media, and secondly, I'm curious to what extent most people eat up whatever the algorithm spits out. (The companies involved have actual data on that, I bet.) I know they exist, because Spotify and Youtube is built on that, but I find that system mostly unrelatable. It happens briefly sometimes with Spotify/Youtube if the specific song/playlist I've picked finishes before I notice, but I've never clicked on something on Netflix just cause, y'know? Most of my media consumption is running off other people's recommendations/interests, and that seems harder to measure.