I've been noticing lately that I seem to get more viewers when I do streams in the evening than I do in the afternoon.

I'm not sure how much I want to do this as a regular thing though because late streams tend to exacerbate my problems with staying up late.

Looking for people's opinions on this.

Two and a half years ago, I had an idle whim to write some content about ponies and corruption. I had this idea for a scene in which Twilight Sparkle was speaking to Celestia and Luna when suddenly everything froze. She was unable to move, but she was still conscious of what was happening as a shadowy figure appeared and worked its power over the other princesses, changing them.

I came to the decision though that this idea would be too complicated for a simple one-shot so instead I just did a story about Non corruption with Celestia and Luna.

Now, here we are.

And where do we go from here?

I suppose I mostly had an idea of what I was getting into when I decided to sit down and write Stains. I always knew the broad strokes of where it would end up going, even if the details weren't entirely certain from the outset. I knew that this was going to be a big commitment. And yet even with that...it was still a lot to deal with. The original impetus behind Stains was that it would be a sequel to Tinged, a continuation of its events and an expansion of the ideas that it presented. By the time I got around to writing and finishing it, though, what it actually is is a sequel to Rising Tide, my big project from last year. Well, maybe more like a prequel, in-universe. It's complicated.

Stains differs most obviously from Rising Tide in its pacing, diving straight into the horror and the fetish from the beginning instead of slowly building from it, and consequently doing more to show the aftermath of these events. But the most significant difference is that Stains ended up being far more personal for me. As I've already said before, the descriptions of the main characters' struggles that are presented in Chapter 9 are largely reflective of my own internal struggles. It was pointed out to me that a lot of them boil down to anxiety about how they are perceived by others in some form or another, which is a good summation of the turmoil that I've felt for the past few years of my life. Spike/Barb, though, was the most significant of them all. It was always something that I knew I wanted to do. Spike fascinates me as a character, as a person who had to grow up around people who are so different to him and having to rationalize those differences as he gets older and learns about what kind of a person he wants to be. This was always something that I wanted to explore. As it came time to actually write about it, though, it occurred to me how relevant it is to me. I don't really know that I can say that I'm transgender, nonbinary may be closer but I don't think that that's entirely accurate either. I don't particularly care how I am identified, I simply want to be something else, something that's not really feasible in real life. I want to be Non. I want to be me. That's the vibe I'm going for with Barb, not merely gender-nonconforming but species-nonconforming. Barb is Barb, pure and simple.

I have done my best to better my self-image by cutting down on self-deprecation, I want to say above all else that I am proud of this product now that it is finished and out in the world, but I don't think I can go without acknowledging some of its shortcomings. The most pertinent is that, despite being labeled as a transformation story, there actually isn't that much transformation that takes place on-screen. Some amount of this can be ascribed to the vibe that I was going for, I wanted to emphasize the horror of discovering that the people you know have turned into something strange and unfamiliar. I think a big part of it though is in the fact that the original concept for the story had it estimated as being a lot shorter than it ended up being. If I had known that the meatier parts of the story, the big dream mediation sessions and the whole sequence leading up to the final battle, would have taken as long as they did, I think I wouldn't have pushed so hard to hurry things along toward the ticking time bomb of the singularity. I think I could have afforded to make more time for going around Ponyville as things are going to shit, showing a few more ponies before they become corrupted. This would also give more allowance for the trauma of these characters to be elaborated upon instead of mostly having to wait until the dreams for them to be revealed. Of course, that would have pushed this from being a 100k+ word story to probably nearly or more than 200k, so...ehhhh.

After several editing passes between completion and uploading, the final word count for Stains is sitting at (by estimations of Microsoft Word) 130,705 words, making it the longest ongoing story I have ever written by a substantial margin. This makes it over twice as long as Rising Tide, but despite that it took over a year for me to complete Stains where the former story only took a month and a half. The majority of Stains was written in the time between mid August and early November, which is a better showing of how I can work at peak efficiency. This, however, came at the cost of me having to work almost exclusively on this project with little time left over for smaller projects. Even since completing Stains I haven't really been done with it, between the editing work and the time I had to spend preparing chapters and pondering over things to say about them in the uploads, which is a large part of why I still haven't done much since November.

I think that amateur writers, as most fanfic authors are, tend to have a bad habit of biting off more than they can chew. It's extremely easy to come in with a plethora of ideas for what you want to do for your story and before you know it the scope is ballooning further and further beyond what you had anticipated it would be to start with and suddenly you've created a monster that consumes all your time and effort. This was why the Eldritchverse never got off the ground beyond pictures and a handful of short snippets and why I never got around to writing anything for the Decaverse before the decision to reboot it again. I didn't want Stains to be nothing more than a spring board for other stories, I wanted it to be something that stood on its own aside from the obvious ways in which is is a continuation of Tinged, and yet all the same I couldn't keep from thinking about ways to expand the concepts and think of further spin-offs and continuations and work in little hints for what might be yet to come. How does Equestria change as a result of this near-cataclysmic event? What does the work Twilight did with Non in the time between the final chapter and the epilogue entail? What happened with characters who weren't shown during the story, like Cadence and Shining Armor? What are the tests that Discord alluded to? Who knows. I have no idea if I'll ever have the time and energy to put those into being.

I am conscious that I am standing at a turning point in my life. I have tasted what it feels like to really create something of substance and to carry it through to completion. I can continue working on fan projects, be they fetish-based or not, I presently have three major story ideas that I could be doing. One of them is an expansion of the original concept that Tinged was going to be, which is ultimately Stains but wholly MLP content. I want to do a Kingsman-inspired action spy thriller starring Rarity and Fleur de Lis. I want to do a new weird cyberpunk story featuring even more indulgent gender identity stuff. Or...I could take that headlong leap into original content. I could work on something that might actually have a chance of being published. I have already made efforts to start The Well of Life, although I'm not certain that I might have to start fresh to better consolidate things. You and Me, Always Forever spawned ideas for what could potentially be an anthology series.

There are many, many things I could be doing, and I simply don't know what I care about the most. The simple fact of the matter is that I don't care about making money, I just want to be able to write what I'm passionate about and, with any luck, get some people who are interested in it. I deeply appreciate everyone who has stuck with Stains through its development and the time that it's taken for it to be uploaded. It is my greatest hope that this story will resonate with someone out there, even just one person, in the same way that it did for me while I was writing it.

To end this long ramble, I'm leaving this post open for readers to ask any questions that they might have, be it about Stains and its potential spin-offs, or about any other projects that may be in the pipeline. Of course, beware that this may entail spoilers for these projects, I can't say for sure how much detail I'll be able to offer for my answers.

I fucking love Kingsman: The Secret Service.

It’s one of those movies that is a true nonstop thrill ride from start to finish. The visual flair of the action is stunning. The characters are immediately striking and they always give you the sense that there’s something more going on behind the scenes. Colin Firth and Samuel L Jackson give iconic performances, they control any scene that they’re in and scenes with both of them together are positively chilling. It’s a pastiche of modern spy movies, it’s cheesy and over the top, and it knows exactly what it is. The church brawl is among the most insane and high octane moments in all of film (never forget what the original context was). It was truly one of the best movies to come out in the past decade.

…But there is one aspect of it that really bothers me.

One of this movie’s greatest strengths is also its greatest weakness. The characters are all great, but they’re all rather static, more or less the same from their first scene to their last. This isn’t too bad for the most part, all of them serve the purpose that they need to. Where this gets to be a problem is when it comes to characters that are actually supposed to have development over the course of the plot. No one embodies this more than who is supposed to be the story’s main protagonist, Gary “Eggsy” Unwin, who is very specifically supposed to be going through an arc as he goes from being a hoodlum on the streets of England to a top-tier spy.

The nature of this arc is rather muddied. Galahad/Harry recognizes that Eggsy has talent, drive, and a strong moral core, but he chides him for giving up on his aspirations and settling for being a mere thug. About halfway through the movie he tells Eggsy that being a “gentleman” has nothing to do with the status of one’s birth but being comfortable with oneself. This, you would think, is supposed to be the core moral of the movie. Eggsy has everything that he needs to be an upstanding and capable individual, he simply needs to look inside himself for the will to do good. Harry seemingly has been making an effort to reach out to more “unlikely” candidates like this in the past, judging from the way Arthur speaks about Lancelot.

Then we get to Eggsy’s final test for Kingsman. He and his dog J.B. come into Arthur’s study. Arthur hands him a gun.

“Shoot the dog,” he says.

This doesn’t exactly come out of nowhere. We see early in the movie that Eggsy is unwilling to run over a cat even if it means getting caught by the police. We also see that he sacrifices himself so that his friends can get away. For all his tough talk, Eggsy is not the kind of person who wants to see harm brought to others, not even if it would be advantageous to him.

So Eggsy fails to shoot J.B. (or Arthur) and is kicked out. It is then revealed that the gun was loaded with a blank so there was no danger. A Kingsman never endangers innocent lives, Harry tells Eggsy.

There are two problems with this.

The first is quite simply that this has nothing to do with Eggsy’s character growth. Eggsy having to be comfortable with the idea of killing someone innocent, someone he might be close to, doesn’t have anything to do with him learning to be a better person.

And even if it was more relevant, even if Eggsy’s arc did revolve around needing to make hard decisions like this, the movie does a shit job of showing that this is the way the Kingsman organization operates. If anything, before this point it goes out of its way to show that Kingsman doesn’t give a shit about the lives of innocents. The new recruits are immediately given the warning that if they break their confidentiality regarding their line of work, both they and their next of kin will be killed. Their first test sees one of them drowning, and we are only told later that this person was actually a plant. There was seemingly a halfhearted attempt to backpedal from this after the parachute test when it’s revealed that they actually all had parachutes after all, but if anything that doesn’t really make it any better. They won’t kill anyone during a test, but they will fuck with them? What would have happened if the last one, the presumed “gimp,” didn’t think to try pulling their cord? If they really cared about people not dying, Merlin would’ve had it set up to remotely deploy everyone’s parachutes once they passed the safety threshold.

And then, after all that, there is no resolution to this. Harry says that he will sort things out when he gets back, but, well, he doesn’t get back. Eggsy then resolves that something needs to be done and comes back to Arthur only to stumble into the discovery that he’s defected to Valentine and Eggsy needs to take matters into his own hands. The character arc is just completely forgotten and we ultimately see Eggsy fully settled into the life of a Kingsman at the end of the movie. We don’t even see J.B. again.

This also ends up with there being very little commentary on the almost hypocritical classism that pervades the Kingsman organization but that’s a topic for another ramble.

It’s really frustrating seeing what is otherwise a fantastic movie be weighed down by such a tremendous flaw.

It’s even more frustrating knowing that it was already done better.

You might not be aware that Kingsman: The Secret Service was originally a comic. Unfortunately, I don’t know how much I can recommend it because it is done something of a disservice by having the movie to compare it to. No amount of gory action is going to seem the same without the added flair that comes from having motion and sound. There is actually very little similarity between the two works outside the broad strokes, with the only directly lifted characters being Eggsy and his immediate family. Harry Hart, for example, is replaced with Jack London, Eggsy’s uncle who frequently has to bail him out of the trouble he gets himself into (and also apparently is just…publicly known to be some kind of big government official?). The Kingsman agents don’t even have the Knights of the Round Table naming scheme. I’m also really not a big fan of the way Eggsy looks, he has a buzz cut and spends a lot of time looking far more like a middle-aged man than a college dropout. I think that a lot of it just doesn’t offer the same sense of thrill that you would get from the movie.

But the one way in which the comic really succeeded was in what was supposed to be its central content, the arc of Eggsy coming into his own. Eggsy is shown to struggle here, he faces relapses when he is made to doubt that he’s doing any good by being a part of Kingsman, and it really calls into focus the fact that he is having to go against his roots. One of his tests has him going undercover to take out a gang, only for him to get there and they recognize him, forcing Eggsy to kill people he was probably once friends with. During an undercover operation, Eggsy overhears some of the trainees talking about how much they doubt him because of his upbringing, prompting him to ditch the operation and then steal Jack’s spymobile for a joyride. At his lowest point, Eggsy has to learn to pull himself out of the ditch he’s dug himself into and own who he is.

What’s even better, though, is that all of this continues into the sequel comic, Kingsman: The Red Diamond. Even though Eggsy has worked hard as a spy, he still faces difficulty with the aristocratic elite in the form of Prince Philip being ungrateful to him during a rescue mission, leading to an altercation that ends up with him forcibly put on leave of absence. We learn that, despite becoming fabulously rich between Eggsy’s new job and inheriting a portion of uncle Jack’s fortune, Eggsy’s mother has fallen in with another shitty boyfriend and is still living in an apartment. He has to bring his little brother to Kingsman’s base of operations to get treatment for a basic condition because he doesn’t know how to handle life at home. In the end, Eggsy settles down not with the fame and accolades that would be given to him for saving the world but simply returns to his home neighborhood with his family. Not to mention that the whole plot is about contending with the rich and power-hungry who would doom the world because they believe that the commonfolk have not “earned” their money.

And it’s certainly a far, far better sequel than the sequel that the movie ended up getting, but that’s a topic for another ramble.

I love Eggsy, I really do. He’s a good boy. Taron Egerton presents a very likeable performance. The concept of a kid being raised up from the street to the position of an elite agent is very engaging and I can understand how that got picked up to have a story built around it (I’m also really glad that the comic didn’t end up getting picked as a Marvel property as the original pitch was going to be). I just wish that there had been more done to actually show and follow through with his development in the movie.

Unfortunately I can't say I have anything Milotic-related to post today. I wanted to write something but I wasn't really feeling it. I'm still reeling in the throes of finishing Stains. Something will get done before the end of the month at least, I hope.



This doesn't mean you're safe, though. You will all be b̶̨̟̪̏͂̏̑̌͒ͅe̷̠̩̱̪̅̋̌͆̉̎͂̀̔͒̽͂ͅä̶͍́̀̌͂̽̑̈́͊͆̊̽̄̏̕͝u̵̢̡͙̠̜̬̥̥͍̳͙̜͚͗̀́̂͠͠ţ̵̧̞̳͕̮̣̰͇̝̗͖̘̌͋́͝i̵̧̨̺̗̍͂́̌̉̀̕f̸̨̛̛̟̜̼̲̭̞̹͚̘̿̐͋̂̈́́̏̐̔͘͜ų̷̺̼͚͇͈̲̦̟̽͊͜ͅl̸̡͍͓͖͕̹̹̣̤͚̞͚̠̈̓.

I remember, among many, many other things, the uproar that came when it was announced that the EXP Share mechanic in Pokémon Sword and Shield was going to be something you couldn’t turn off. It had been an immensely contentious mechanic to begin with when it was introduced in the X and Y, but at least back then you could just choose not to deal with it if you didn’t want to. Now there wasn’t a choice in the matter, you were just going to have to accept that your whole party was going to get inundated with experience all the time.

So…I accepted that.

I frankly don’t understand the majority of the complaints that have come about the mainline Pokémon games becoming “too easy” in the past decade because it almost entirely comes down to decisions the player had to make. If you walked up to Diantha with a team in the 70s or 80s, did it just never occur to you that you could have turned off the EXP Share? If you’re obliterating everything in your path with your Mega Latios/Latias, maybe you shouldn’t have made the conscious decision to put it into your party and tap the mega evolve button every single battle? If you download a Torchic or shiny Beldum with their respective mega stones or a level 100 legendary and put them on your party at the start of the game, what outcome were you expecting to result from that? You don’t have any right to complain about not having enough of a challenge if you’re actively going out of your way to make it not a challenge. Lots of games have options that will let you cheese vast swathes of gameplay, but it’s entirely the player’s choice to use them or not. This isn’t even something new to Pokémon, all the way back in Red and Blue you could have an Alakazam sweeping everything you come across, and since Gen 3 there has almost always been an option for some Olympus Mon you can catch leading into the endgame.

Now, I admit, working around the permanent EXP Share in SwSh was a lot trickier, but it was still doable. Just have a rotating selection for your team. If you think one of your Pokémon is too high of a level, swap them out for a while. The fact that you can access the PC from anywhere almost makes me feel like this was the intended way to play the game. And this has a dual benefit in that it gives you the flexibility to play around with more Pokémon than you might have otherwise, you have more freedom before you have to commit to the six that will make up your final team. I feel this is a lot more in the spirit of what it should mean to be a Pokémon trainer, to mix and match with a variety of Pokémon instead of just focusing to a select few. Consequently, I don’t remember ever being egregiously overleveled throughout the gym challenge, each town presenting a jump of a modest few levels, and so grinding was never an issue.

…But then something happened.

I got to Wyndon and came into the Marnie battle being nearly 10 levels higher than her team. I legitimately don’t know and can’t remember how this happened, I didn’t do any battles beyond the few trainers along Route 10 and catching a few wild Pokémon. I saw someone else playing the game and they had a very similar level disparity when they got to this point. It certainly didn’t help though that Marnie’s team is on comparable level to Raihan’s gym, and from that point on the levels don’t get much higher. The interlude with Macro Cosmos saw me fighting Pokémon that were comparable or lower level to the teams of Marnie and Hop, so I was just getting yet more experience while fighting teams that I effortlessly ground beneath my heels, giving me even more of a buffer when I got back to the stadium for the finals.

And then, after all that, going through Rose and Eternatus, I came up to Leon…and he was higher level than me! Where were all these levels before this??? It made Leon a decent challenge, but was it worth making everything that came before him a pushover? That was my experience in Shield, a game that offered a comfortable difficulty curve through most of its run before suddenly turning into a cakewalk at the very end.

Then in the past month I played Shining Pearl, which turned into a cakewalk before I was halfway through the game.

There is so, so much that I could go into about Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, but for the time being I’m just going to be focusing on the experience that I had with level curves over the course of the game. As with SwSh, I was conscious of what I would have to deal with in terms of the EXP Share, I was ready to play around with my team. For most of the early game, things were working out pretty fine, I was playing smoothly up to Eterna City. Gardenia proved to be a challenge, but I was surprised when I got to Jupiter and found that her team was lower level (and her Skuntank was way less nasty because it didn’t have Night Slash). This would turn out to be a premonition of things to come. I went through the long trek to Veilstone, and the trainers didn’t have Pokémon breaking out of the low 20s, so after a while I naturally swapped out my Pokémon to keep them from getting too overpowered. Imagine my surprise when I got to Maylene’s gym and discovered that the Pokémon there were all in the mid-to-high 20s, with her Lucario at level 30. So I actually had to do some grinding for the first time in a long while, and this gym proved to be a pretty big challenge, and now my main team was hovering around level 30.

After that, I left Veilstone and I discovered that the trainers on route 214 had gone back to being in the low 20s. In fact, all of the trainers in that circuit around Hearthome are in that range. Wake’s gym in Pastoria had Pokémon that were the exact same level ranges as Maylene’s, but by that point I was significantly higher level than him so I didn’t have any problem wiping the floor with him. I had to swap to my B team for the whole detour to Celestic Town just to give my main team a break. All that just to get hit with a difficulty spike in the middle of the Hearthome gym, with all of its trainers being in the high 20s, then Fantina suddenly having a team with a level 32, 34, and 36, all of which were speedy attackers with wide coverage.

That would be the last curve ball for a while. I was consistently overleveled for the rest of the game and plowed through just about every encounter. Even the last three gym leaders and the final Team Galactic encounters were pushovers, only Palkia posed some difficulty because of its power and having Aqua Ring. Even with skipping several trainers, I still vastly overpowered my rival at the Pokémon League and everything along the way.

Then…the Elite Four was fucking brutal. Even Aaron wasn’t a pushover, tanking some of my strongest hits and dishing back heavy blows in turn. Flint and Lucian took out several of my team and I had no easy answers for some of their Pokémon. I was pissing myself thinking how I’d handle Cynthia, I knew there was almost certainly nothing I had that could stand up to her Garchomp. In the end, the only solution I came up with was to put out my Roserade and, for what might have been the first time in my career of playing these games, pump up on X items to the point of being able to tank any hit (while praying for no crits) and one-shot anything I had a type advantage on.

I suspect that the primary intent with the change to the EXP Share was an attempt to mitigate grinding. Now your whole team can gain experience, you don’t have to worry about juggling one party member more than any of the others, and it’s a lot easier to train up Pokémon from a low level so you aren’t stuck carrying dead weight. As a result, I don’t remember any major points of contention with having to sit around grinding for hours and hours from Gen 6 onward like I had to do in the games before that point. This, however, only works if the opponents that you’re facing are consistently getting stronger to match you. In SwSh it mostly worked up until the end of the game, but in BDSP the level curve gets thrown out the window almost immediately because it wasn’t sufficiently altered from the original games to account for the new changes, with the disparity getting worse and worse up until the literal end of the main story when finally you get five battles in a row that increasingly test your limits because they overcompensated at the last minute.

EXP Share in of itself is not a problem. EXP Share is a problem in the way that it exacerbates problems the games already had. They’re trying to make the experience less taxing, but it always inevitably runs into roadblocks. They wanted Leon to be a suitable final opponent, so they had to try to mitigate the odds that you’d come to him overleveled by making the trainers before him significantly weaker. This played out all over again with the endgame of BDSP but even more extreme. In both cases they significantly overcompensated. The best attempt to play with difficulty thus far was in Sun and Moon through the Totem Pokémon battles and similar encounters like eldritch Lusamine, but that was innovation and we can’t be bothered to keep with something like that for more than one generation. I don’t really have any solutions because it seems like the solution ought to be the obvious one: just maintain some level of consistency so your players don’t start defeating opponents by sneezing on them and there’s no risk of a sudden massive difficulty spike. Yes I want Cynthia to step on me but I want to at least stand a chance.

Sing (2016) is a movie that exists.

I distinctly remember thinking when I first saw promotional material for it “Great, Illumination is doing a Zootopia cash-in” and being ready to dismiss it.

And then they put out the trailer that had a cover of Dream On by Aerosmith and that meant I was obligated to go see it.

It was fine. Even if they didn’t actually play Dream On in the movie.

I don’t think that saying Sing is a Zootopia cash-in is entirely enough to describe the situation, though. Sing is very clearly trying to do its own thing, and it mostly succeeds at what it wants to do. Jukebox musicals have been popular and audiences like having underdog characters to root for, there doesn’t need to be anything especially complicated. All I’m saying is that I wouldn’t be surprised if someone at Illumination had been kicking around the idea for a movie about a singing competition for a while and then news of Zootopia broke out and they decided to have the characters be animals. It is a movie which is very up-front about what it is.

I have wanted to make a ramble about Sing for a while to sort out my mixed feelings about the movie. It was going to be a list of the various points for and against it, full Jenny Nicholson-style. Unfortunately, partway through my computer crashed and I lost all my progress because notepad doesn’t have autosave, and in the time since then I haven’t been particularly motivated to try rewriting it all. It’s only now that I’m getting some inspiration to try this from a slightly different angle.

So, to stretch out this preamble a little longer, a rough summary:

I Can’t Hate Sing Even Though I Probably Should: Abridged Version

I generally like Sing. I find it to be a pleasant, reasonably entertaining, occasionally emotional experience from beginning to end. I like the vast majority of the characters, they are funny and relatable and have clear arcs. I like Rosita and Johnny and Ash and Meena and I want them to succeed. I even want Buster to succeed at his big theater con job despite him being an unrepentant asshole. I appreciate that there isn’t an overabundance of exceedingly obnoxious content, Gunter easily could have been awful but he had a great chemistry going with Rosita. I think they had pretty good designs for all the animals of this setting and a varied cast (even if almost all of the main cast consisted of mammals by the end). I particularly liked Meena’s design, I love how she keeps her big elephant ears folded around her head and they steadily open up when she starts singing. I genuinely tear up a little at moments like Ash breaking down during her recital or when Meena finally starts singing at the end. Oh, and Nana Noodleman is prime gmilf material. I always have a good time when I watch this movie.

I say all this as primer for the fact that I really ought to hate everything this movie represents in terms of the erosion of modern mainstream media. In enjoying this movie I am playing directly into the hands of corporate-mandated lazy mass-market appeal, just like everyone who liked Minions or The Lorax or inevitably the upcoming Super Mario Bros. movie. For as much as I liked (most of) these characters, I really struggle to think of much to say about them beyond one or two basic personality traits and how determined they are to achieve their goals. A single one of these characters' arcs could have been enough to base a movie around, but instead they decided to cram all of them into one movie and they all got the bare minimum amount of development they needed. The conflict is paper-thin and basically evaporates into nothing when the Moon Theater gets destroyed during the second act. The movie goes as far as it can to not put any character over the others, essentially making the singing competition doomed from the word go, because only having one winner would mean letting all the others down. The backstory is extremely tell-don’t-show to avoid drawing attention to the fact that Buster seems to be a really shit theater manager and maybe doesn’t actually know much of anything about theater, and by the end of the movie it doesn’t seem like he’s actually had to learn much of anything. Everything that could possibly be done to shave this product down to the most barebones feel-good experience it could be has been done.

Except for one creative decision which I just don’t understand at all.

And that brings us, at long last, to Mike.

As with everything else about this movie, the viewer is told everything they need to know about Mike in his very first scene. Mike the mouse, voiced by Seth MacFarlane, is seen during the pan across the city, playing a saxophone on the street and wearing what appears to be a rather expensive tuxedo that I’d expect to be out of the budget of a street performer. A passer-by drops him some cash, which prompts him to go ballistic on them and insist that they’re holding out on him, proceeding to berate them and then steal right from their wallet while they collapse from an asthma attack. You know, a real pleasant person that we definitely don’t want to see get eaten by a bear.

Mike is an utter anomaly in this movie, and he is quite possibly the worst character that a piece of fiction has ever tried to get me to view sympathetically.

I could go on and on about the things that I hate about Mike. I hate his smug arrogance and how he pushes aside everyone around him. I hate his conspicuous out-of-place accent. I hate how he gets to hook up with Tara Strong. I hate his constant shit-eating grin. I hate the grody mid-orgasm O-face he has literally every time he’s singing, no seriously he looks like he’s creaming his pants whenever he’s got a microphone.

But it doesn’t really matter how bad Mike is as a person. The real problem is how bad Mike is as a character, as a plot element. Because, by all accounts, Mike really doesn’t belong in this story. Mike, in fact, actively undermines this story.

Let’s review all the other contestant characters and their respective motivations. Rosita wants to break out from her grueling housewife existence and show the world she can sing. Johnny wants to get out from his father’s shadow and show the world he can sing. Ash wants to show the world she can sing no matter what her shitty boyfriend tells her. Meena wants to go through a Fluttershy episode plot— I mean show the world she can sing. Even Gunter just really wants to have the opportunity to perform. Buster’s advice to all of them is “Just sing”, just sing your heart out, keep moving forward, don’t let yourself get held back. These are characters who have something to prove and they put their all into it.

Mike doesn’t have anything to prove. Mike doesn’t really have any passion for singing, ultimately, for him it’s just a means to an end. He’s a street performer, he does this every day. This is all just about the money for him. He doesn’t even bother with practice most of the time because he’s certain that he’s guaranteed to win the competition, and he drops out from the new show as soon as it becomes apparent there’s no prize on the table. Mike only comes back in the end because some rando on the street challenged his manhood. And probably because he wanted to get off in front of a live audience.

But what I really don’t understand is what logic went into the decision that a character like this was necessary to include in the first place. Given what I’ve said above about how low-stakes the conflict is and how few “unlikeable” characters there are among the theater cast, why would they put in a character like Mike who is so blatantly and unrepentantly awful? Were they really just that desperate for another big celebrity name to tack onto the trailers so they begged Seth MacFarlane to voice a character? Did they really want to pander to Frank Sinatra fans? Did they think it would be enough to turn around opinions on him by having a single moment in which he is awed by Meena’s performance at the end before fucking out of the movie? They must have, considering they went out of their way to redeem all of the other characters who didn’t appreciate the main cast enough, Rosita’s husband and Johnny’s dad and even Ash’s shitty boyfriend.

I feel like Mike is only there out of necessity. They needed some contrived way to bring conflict into the movie because the competition was so limp to begin with, so they had someone who could piss off some random mobsters and cause a big crisis to start off the third act. And then after that he’s basically gone. After his song in the show, he just drives off with his girlfriend and one of the bears clinging onto his car, with no conclusion as to what ultimately happens. He doesn’t even appear in the group photo for the new theater’s opening in the final shot of the movie.

Also Mike is way too much of a privileged straight white male in what is otherwise a cast that entirely consists of disenfranchised women and queer men.

There are plenty of ways Mike could have worked. Maybe he could have been more invested in the performance, and because he’s experienced with doing shows it would quickly become apparent to him how much of a sham Buster is. Maybe despite his greed and arrogance, he still gets pulled into the competition because he sees that there’s some genuine talent on display. Maybe he could have had his relationship with one of the other characters fleshed out more, probably Meena, something that would make his reaction at the end more meaningful.

But we’ll never know what more could have been done with Mike, because Sing 2 is on the horizon and Seth MacFarlane is conspicuously missing from the cast. It seems at the moment like most of the characters are just facing rehashes of their arcs from the first movie, and the lion voiced by Bono is a world-weary past-his-prime musician who Mike also probably would have fit better as than as a smug asshat. I guess he really did get eaten by the bear in the end after all. And nothing of value was lost.

So, in conclusion:

I was here first, you can’t take Nana from me, I have dibs on the hot wolf.

So, I've come to the decision that I would like to go ahead and get started on the prereading for Stains.

And what, you may ask, is Stains?

Stains is the for-some-reason-long-awaited continuation of the events of Tinged, dealing with the continued spread of Nonification across Equestria, Twilight Sparkle's efforts to combat it, and the revelations which she and her friends must come to in the process. It is a fetishistic horror story with a heavy emphasis on characters overcoming their pain and trauma.

As of this writing, it is currently clocking in at approximately eighty-eight thousand words. Given this, I feel it is necessary to get some additional eyes to have a look at the story to make it less likely that any mistakes slip through the cracks, and for some potential input.

Please bear in mind that this is not a small undertaking I am asking for. More than merely reading the text, I am looking for input and attention to detail, to check for errors, inconsistencies, and thematic or plot-related concerns. To say nothing of the length, given that, again, the story is sitting at ~88k words and looking to have in the ballpark of another 40k left to go. I'm hoping to have the initial draft completed by the end of November and the whole story done and ready to go up by the end of the year, so there's plenty of time but it's still preferable to have that input as early as possible, in case there's anything I need to take into account for the later chapters. Reading Tinged is not specifically required, but considering it's far shorter it's probably worth looking at and if it's not your cup of tea then Stains probably won't be either. Lastly I would say it's important to be aware that this is a story which, in addition to its fetish content, deals with some heavy mental health themes in its latter parts, so if that's something you don't feel comfortable approaching then this might not be the story for you.

If you are interested in offering your assistance for this effort, please contact me via notes for further discussion (or or on Discord if you have me there already). Also I'm probably going to set up google docs for making suggestions on the text, so you'll need to have a google account so I can give you the appropriate permission and access for it.

(Caution: Spoilers for My Little Pony: A New Generation further down.)

In The Land Before Time VII: The Stone of Cold Fire, Littlefoot’s gang has to contend with Petrie’s narcissist uncle Pterano. Unlike the nameless carnivores that served as antagonists in most of these squijillion dinosaur kids’ movies, Pterano is actually sapient and gets to have dialogue expounding upon his personality and motives. Even more unique about him, a trait only shared with the bully dinos in the third movie (and Daddy Tops, I guess), is that he’s presented as a somewhat sympathetic character with goals that aren’t as simple as feasting on Longneck steak. Sure, he’s got a big problem with ego and accepting responsibility for his actions, but it’s made clear that he has regrets about the harm that he caused and that he doesn’t want the children meddling with his plans to get hurt. It’s a fairly complex situation to have in a movie for eight-year-olds.

But also, because it’s a movie for eight-year-olds, they really need to hammer it into your head to prepare you for the face turn at the end of the movie, so the kids sing a song called Good Inside which is all about how everyone has good inside them, yin and yang etcetera etcetera.

Everybody has a lot of good inside them
and everybody has a little bad
Everyone is going to make you happy sometimes
and everyone is going to make you sad
They will trip on your tail, or tromp on your toes,
or knock you in a puddle
It is not that they mean to be mean, no, no
They are only in a bit of a muddle

It’s an okay thing to have in a kids’ movie. I don’t think that Pterano is exactly a bad person who has a hint of good inside him—a jerk with a heart of gold—rather that he’s a reasonably decent person but he has this one really bad personality flaw that he can’t get over. People can’t always be concisely sorted into good or bad, and people like Pterano may need a lot of help to get over their harmful negative traits.

But then when Pterano falters upon reaching his goal at the eponymous stone of cold fire, his cronies Rinkus and Sierra take over the villain spotlight, and the kids don’t have any problem with leaving them to die when the volcano they’re on erupts. So much for whatever good they had in them, I guess (I mean, not really, they just get comically singed and flung away, but still).

I feel this is a line that gets toed with a lot when it comes to situations that involve redeeming villainous characters. It can’t be enough for a character to just have a reason to be doing bad things and see the error of their ways, there always has to be someone else for the role of villain to be passed off to now that the original holder has decided to have a change of heart. Understandable, to some degree, there certainly are some people who really are just irredeemable, but when the story is trying to pass off some narrative about friendship or being good inside it feels like it falls a little flat when it presents another character as being beyond that redemption. There always needs to be someone who is acting as the antagonist. And the example of Pterano and his cronies is a rather tame one, it’s not like Rinkus and Sierra have any meaningful presence after the moment when they oust him for being too much of a wimp because the movie is basically over at that point.

This is something that has happened with painful regularity in the recent years of My Little Pony. They did it with Garble by introducing a random new dragon to become the head of his old trio of bullies after he decided to come out about being a beatnik. They did it with Diamond Tiara being abused by her mother. They did it with Neighsay getting sidelined by Cozy Glow (who herself is basically a replacement for Diamond Tiara) and deciding that racism is bad without any prompting. They did it with Flim and Flam being pitted against each other by the casino owner (before they went back to their old ways immediately). They did it with Coloratura having an asshole manager so there could be no complicated thoughts about her wanting to be a pop star instead of doing heartfelt traditional music as is clearly proper. They did it retroactively in the comics with Discord being goaded into acting cruel by Cosmos and also everything about Siege of the Crystal Empire before that presumably got retconned itself, thank fuck.

And the reason I’m pushing myself to write this now is that it just happened again in A New Generation. The movie makes you think right from the beginning that Phyllis Cloverleaf is going to be the main antagonist with her pushy xenophobia and running a company entirely devoted to keeping earth ponies safe from the supposed threat of pegasi and unicorns. She’s a shameless megacorp leader who seemingly has effective control over the town of Maretime Bay and you’d think she’d have plenty of reason to keep the status quo for as long as possible—after all, it doesn’t matter how clearly ineffective her products are, ponies are going to eat them up because they’re afraid and they don’t know any better. But, no, partway through the movie Phyllis seems to develop an allergy for the spotlight and lets her son Sprout take over with his newfound fascist regime. Phyllis ends the movie seemingly having decided to recant her ways and she comes together with the other “leaders” of the pony races (to be fair it’s better than Neighsay at least), while Sprout is left to sulk after he used his wunderwaffe mecha to wreck Sunny’s home and nearly kill several ponies. Boy I can’t wait to see this character get into wacky shenanigans and be made to learn friendship lessons when the actual show comes out.

When it comes to stories involving complex conflicts of morality, the example that always comes to mind for me is Princess Mononoke. The viewer is led to assume early on that Lady Eboshi and the people of Irontown are the ones in the wrong—they’re destroying the forest, they’re the ones who attacked the boar Nago and caused him to become a demon, making them the indirect cause of the curse that’s placed on Ashitaka. But then it turns out that, no, the people of Irontown are just people, they just want to make a living, and for all her hubristic ambition Eboshi is a benevolent leader who offers positions of power to both men and women and gives safe haven to the sick, and she seems to regard San with pity more than contempt. You want to root for the wolf-wannabe girl and her wolf milf mom, but even though they are defending their territory they are also going out of their way to terrorize Irontown and disrupt their trade routes. It is only through balance that the inhabitants of both the town and the forest can be made to coexist with each other.

But I’m sure you’re thinking “Non, don’t you think it’s a bit unfair to compare children’s media to Studio Ghibli?” Perhaps. Let’s look at another example then by going back to a land before time.

In The Land Before Time III: The Time of the Great Giving, Littlefoot’s gang has to contend with the dual dilemmas of a group of teenaged dinos bullying them and a drought which prompts Daddy Tops to do what he does best, being a self-important asshole. Daddy Tops’s attempts to assert himself as leader of the valley creates a rift between him and Cera and nearly results in both of their deaths when a wildfire breaks out. Hyp, the lead bully, is taking out his frustration on the gang because of his strained relationship with his own father, and he has his group set out to try to find water to hoard all for themselves. All these plot lines converge in the climax as Daddy Tops sees how harsh Hyp’s father is to him, realizing how cruel he in turn had been to Cera, and they all come to the conclusion that they need to work together to remove the debris blocking the source of water for the Great Valley, and that they need to be better dino-people. Sure, it’s on the basic side and more than a little clumsy—much like the situation with Diamond Tiara and Spoiled Rich, Hyp’s father and their relationship aren’t seen at all until right before their resolution is made. Also a pack of velociraptors comes out of nowhere because the climax needs to have some kind of tension. Still, it all contributes to the series’s overarching message of the importance of working together as the dinosaurs cooperate to survive after the widespread destruction of the Great Valley, putting aside their differences and grievances.

I guess the gist of all this ultimately is that it feels rather lame to have an antagonist turn face only to have another character step in to fill the exact same role. Why even bother with having the antagonist in the first place if you’re going to make them interchangeable like that?



Why yes, I have been watching the entire The Land Before Time series. Hope you’re ready for a needless deep dive on that in the future.

Imagine, if you will:

Twilight Sparkle and company come to Our Town at the behest of the map. They are met with a host of creepy ponies that definitely isn’t a cult with an insane leader. It’s very clearly sus right from the get-go.

But they’re anthro and they’re all wearing conservative body-concealing clothes, so how are the protagonists going to know that they all have conspicuous matching equality cutie marks? Unless they don’t have a problem baring their asses to show how equal they are.

Being set in a children’s show about cartoon horses, clothing is largely unnecessary, usually little more than a luxury reserved for formal occasions and the classiest of horses. Because nudity isn’t a problem, this means it’s easy to flaunt their flanks and the personalized marks they’ve got dyed into their fur. This starts becoming problematic, though, if you remove cartoon anatomy from the equation and make them anthro (heck, even without making them anthro). How are ponies going to show what their special talents are without going around bottomless in public? How are Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon going to shame Apple Bloom for not having a cutie mark without pantsing her at school and getting detention every day? How are the Mane Six going to lamentably look at their asses with their incorrect cutie marks during Magical Mystery Cure if they’re wearing pants and skirts at the time? Do they have to dramatically pull off their clothes to see that Starlight Glimmer has stolen their cutie marks and branded them with her cult insignia?

The way I see it, there are four possible rationalizations for this conundrum:

1) Pony fashion doesn’t perfectly mirror human sensibilities, with a leaning toward clothing designs that keep the hips exposed so the cutie mark can be visible.

2) (Possibly in tandem with the above) Anthro ponies don’t have to have cutie marks on their hips like canon ponies do. They might instead be located in places that are related to whatever the pony’s special talent is (e.g. Rainbow Dash might have her mark on her wings or the backs of her shoulders). This may still pose problems though if the mark is placed next to or on the genitals so there’s no feasible way to show it without being indecent.

3) Ponies have some form of clothing accessory that resembles the cutie mark so they can have it be easily known. Of course this still leaves the problem of being unable to know when something cutie mark-related happens in the plot and causes them to be removed or changed.

4) Ponies as a society just don’t care about nudity. This is something which applies even to non-anthro ponies, since it just gets confusing when they’re casually walking around without clothes and then suddenly they’re supposed to have genitalia for the sex scenes.

I think it can be difficult to avoid falling into the pitfalls of the societal norms we’re used to when working on fantasy, sometimes it’s necessary to consider that a fantasy culture might differ wildly on very basic matters, even those as simple as wearing pants.

This has been a mini-ramble that I felt like writing on the spur of the moment, possibly as a result of writing around a certain scene. I’m sure plenty of people have already thought about this kind of thing by now but meh.

I really need to get back to (re)writing the Sing ramble.

I recently finished reading Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo.

It’s a fairly neat introduction to a fantasy world. I haven’t seen Russia used as a point of inspiration for a setting like this before and I appreciate seeing how that culture and history are translated here. Ravka is a bleak place, cold and barren and ravaged by war from hostile neighbors on all sides, suffering under the rule of a careless and self-indulgent monarchy, and the presence of a sea of darkness full of horrific monsters cutting the country in half is practically a drop in the bucket. The Grisha and their abilities are like a meeting of bending from Avatar: The Last Airbender and alchemy from Fullmetal Alchemist, with a strong emphasis on high-class elegance. The protagonist, Alina, is forced to confront her long-standing inner doubts to open up to the world and recognize her potential while she explores these new avenues that have been opened up to her. I had some qualms with the plot but I was overall really engrossed in the ideas that this story had to offer and I’m really curious to see where the story goes from here.

My only hope is that the characters will actually get a reasonable amount of development from here on out.

Despite the attention that is lavished upon the setting, the characters of Shadow and Bone leave something to be desired in my eyes. Aside from Alina herself, the only characters who leave a distinct impression of being reasonably well-rounded are Mal, the Darkling, Genya, and maybe Baghra. The others are mostly limited to a few basic traits and little else. Ivan is a gruff asshole. Zoya is a petty jealous bitch. David is quiet and obsessed with his work. Botkin is a mildly sus Asian stereotype. The King is Nicholas II and the Apparat is Rasputin. Alina has four named classmates at the Little Palace who are occasionally mentioned, Nadia, Marie, Sergei, and Ivo, and I don’t think I could tell you anything about any of them other than that they’re catty and vain—Nadia and Marie are practically interchangeable and I don’t think they ever appear separately from each other. Even Mal’s character mostly revolves around his relationship to Alina, his person outside that being about his position as a tracker and not much else, and despite being a vital lynchpin of Alina’s arc he’s absent for more than half of the book.

I could talk about other problems I have with the book but the main thing I want to focus on is the dichotomy of development as it is applied to the characters and to the world of a story. I feel that worldbuilding is kind of a hot topic in sci-fi and fantasy stories these days, readers really want to see that you have an expansive setting with all the details about how the characters in it go about their lives and the struggles they have to deal with and what the economy and politics and religion are like and so on and so forth. I’m not saying that this is a bad thing, I certainly enjoy seeing all these aspects myself, I like seeing what people can come up with as a reflection of the world around them, I like seeing how creators can take a concept and examine what kind of broader impact it would have on its world. But I don’t think that means much of anything if that setting doesn’t have any interesting characters to follow. I want to see arcs, I want to see change, I want to see struggle.

Some of you reading this may recall that a while ago I read the Spliced trilogy, another YA series which I felt had a similar issue in regard to its focus. I thought that the author put a lot of work into developing the setup for the world in which the story takes place. There was a lot to show how run-down the future has become between disease and climate crises, in some ways closely paralleling real life. There are great lengths to demonstrate the processes involving in splicing and what culture has sprung up surrounding chimeras. It was clear that a point was being made of how the logistics of discrimination don’t make sense with how much time is spent ruminating upon the details of the Genetic Heritage Act—e.g. if chimeras aren’t legally considered people then they can’t be arrested and charged for crime. All these details go a long way in elaborating on how dark and grim and ultimately fairly realistic the setting is, which helps make the story feel believable.

But I can’t say that I felt much of anything for most of the characters, even more so compared to Shadow and Bone. Jimi is a milquetoast teen girl protagonist and Rex is her big beefcake boyfriend and neither really has to evolve much beyond that. The side characters who come along for the ride in the first book don’t get much elaboration beyond their initial appearances and quietly fade into the background in the sequels, and the majority of the other characters who get introduced as the scope of the plot expands are given similar barebones treatments. Del/Tamil/Cronos had the most potential to have complex growth over the course of the series, but he was completely out of focus for more than half of it and his story arc ends in a wet thud with little having been accomplished. From beginning to end I am just given the impression that these characters are being ferried from one plot point to the next so they can see further elucidations on the nature of the world in which they exist.

And oh boy, fanfiction. It’s only relatively recently that I’ve actually been investing a decent amount of time in reading big MLP fan stories, but I have to imagine that it was a big part of what led to the fandom becoming as large as it did in the first place. With a setting as loose and open as that presented in Friendship is Magic, especially during the first few seasons, there was a lot of interest to expand upon what was presented, for each fan to offer their own interpretations on how the world worked. And from what I’ve been seeing I can’t help getting the impression that sometimes writers are just so damn desperate to think about all these details that they forget about everything else. I read a story called The Fishbowl which presents an interesting take on the nature of the Equestria Girls world and the impact it might have on one who becomes aware of it, only to become progressively bogged down with random fluff that doesn’t add anything to the main story arc. I read a story called Pandemic (not written in 2020, surprisingly) which goes into great detail about what would happen if there were interdimensional contact between Equestria and the real world and how humans would have to cope with transforming into ponies, but the characters were flat all the way through and most of the conflict came from bickering over logistics, and the ending just seemed to be for the sake of setting up sequel bait. I’m currently in the middle of reading a story called Myths and Birthrights, and while I am for the time being very impressed with the expansion upon the world and its inhabitants and its ideas for how alicorns work, I can’t keep down my doubts for how some of the characters are noticeably fading into the background, Twilight Sparkle’s massive extended family may very well end up only being brought up for the sake of backstory with many of them not appearing after their introduction.

How did this end up happening? I can’t say I’m exactly an expert on such matters. I suspect Game of Thrones was likely a big influence on a lot of people, especially after the TV show began and made the idea of gritty fantasy worlds more popularized. In the YA crowds, everything probably goes back to Harry Potter, everyone wanted to have their own wizarding world or what-have-you.

But a fair amount of it may just be that writing character development is a really fucking exhausting process.

If there’s anything I’ve learned from writing it’s that adding characters significantly increases the scope and length of a story. More characters means you need to have more dialogue and more description and more back-and-forth interaction, and the effect that this has on how many words it takes to convey properly is often exponential. The sections of Rising Tide with more than two characters had a tendency to spiral out of control as I fumbled to come up with things for everyone to do, and I dread getting to the parts of Stains that will have all of the Mane Six and more present at once. There’s only so much that you can fit into the span of the average 100k-ish word novel. The best examples that I can think of for stories that balance the setting and the characters are Stephen King books like Under the Dome and It, stories where even the smallest characters help inform the reader on what the setting is like and build toward the ultimate climaxes, but those are behemoths with word counts extending well into sextuple (ha, sex) digits, something which isn’t the most feasible thing to do. Therefore, if you want to put a lot into worldbuilding, characters are going to have to be largely condensed.

I’m not entirely sure why I decided to go to the effort of saying all this. I guess it’s mostly me coming to the realization of how difficult it is to fit any decent amount of character development into a short passage while still juggling other narrative elements. Not everything needs to be ultra-detailed in every story. In Shadow and Bone, I can at least acknowledge that the limited characterization serves to further illustrate how much of a loner Alina is—if she can’t stray far enough from her personal bubble to get to know others more, then of course the audience isn’t going to have the opportunity to learn such information either. It makes me realize how having a large core cast can make a story more interesting for a reader, but it can make it more difficult for the writer to create the story in the first place.

I finally bought a proper SAI license yesterday and upgraded to trying SAI 2. After fiddling around for a while I got things working and felt like I was in a reasonable position to have things working.

Then I ran into a problem. While it didn't seem to have any issue saving as a .sai2 file all throughout the working progress, when I went to save a picture as .png it gave me an error, saying "The handle is invalid."

I looked this up and everything I've found suggests that it's something to do with antivirus permissions. Most of the help threads that I have found, though, don't elaborate on what actually needs to be changed. I have tried to make numerous changes and none of them have had any effect.

I also tried saving as .jpg just to check and that gave the error message "Access is denied."

I can't seem to save in other locations than my usual wip folder either.

Has anyone experienced anything of this sort? I'm running Windows 10 and my antivirus is AVG Free.


Update: I figured it out. I hadn't added the picture folder to exceptions yet.

So I got a new computer yesterday.

While I'm still panicking over files, a new thing offered by this computer is that it has a detachable screen which I can use as a tablet, which may effectively completely remove the need for my old drawing tablet. However, I'm aware of the inevitability that this would result in a lot of smudging of the screen as I put my hand against it so I want to see about taking preventative measures for that into account as soon as possible.

I know that I've seen a kind of glove people wear while drawing on a tablet and I'm not quite sure what that's called or what to search for.

I also know of compression gloves which are probably also a thing worth getting but I don't know if that's the same thing.

Can anyone give any recommendations for this?

I've come to a significant decision regarding my work.

For the past couple years I've been trying my damnedest to make sure that I get at least one piece of writing and art posted every month to continue showing the progress that I'm making as a creator. This has worked out decently well for me more often than not.

But last year something happened. I wrote and completed Rising Tide, my first extensive long-term writing project, significantly longer than anything I had created in a long time. I had cast off the shackles of my long-standing inability to complete any of the multi-part stories I endeavored to create. It was new territory for me. It whetted my appetite.

Around the same time back in October, I had started Stains, the much bigger follow-up to Tinged. I have made significant progress on it, but it is still nowhere near completion. And, in the time since then, I have only been thinking of more and more big projects that I would like to work on.

Consequently, I no longer feel the same sense of satisfaction from completing small stories. My ambition has overtaken my past desires.

I want nothing more than to complete Stains before the end of October, so that it doesn't end up taking more than a year to finish, and so that I can then move on to whatever I want to do next. So, to that end, I've decided that from now on I'm going to make long-term projects my primary focus. If I'm struck with the inspiration to work on something smaller in scale, then I'll get that out, but I'm no longer going to fight with myself by splitting up my focus over and over again.

Sometime in 2009, I believe, I first began to get involved in furry communities by watching streams of art and videogames. It was a lively and generally friendly and positive environment that left a profound impact upon me. It happened to be how I decided upon my online name and it was how I met my longest and closest friend.

So, naturally, I tried to get into streaming myself as soon as I could. Back then it was mostly just games, and for a while it was only things I could play on emulator, old Gameboy and Gameboy Advance games. I was eventually able to get capture cards and upgrade to actual console games, and I started streaming writing and coloring and videos. I got into a regular habit of it with an alternating schedule between myself and my friends. I had recurring events like the yearly playthrough of Journey on my birthday. I really genuinely felt like I was upping my game over time and I always relished putting on shows.

I enjoyed being able to share things with people. I enjoyed having the opportunity to discuss my interests and what others thought of them.

I could always look forward to doing or watching a stream and having the chance to talk with my peers. Streaming was like my rock in those years while I was in college, it was a thing I could look forward to to brighten day.

It's been a long time since that was the case.

As the years went by, I came to notice that the attendance for my streams was declining dramatically. The people I used to know stopped coming to watch regularly, if not entirely. I'm sure that in more than a few of these cases, it was simply a matter of growing distant with the other parties in question, or the inevitability of having less free time as adult responsibilities come into the picture. This was my strongest means of identifying that I was on friendly terms with someone. Without the chance to interact through streams, I wasn't able to be sure whom I really was close to.

But in the time since then I don't feel like anyone new has come in to fill that void. I interact with far more people than I did back in those days, and yet I can't feel certain that I have a significant bond with any of them. I don't know how to feel outside the context of streams.

I don't expect any one person to devote themselves wholly to me at every waking hour of their life. I know that things come up that can get in the way of these occasions, that's unavoidable. I know that other people have different schedules or are in different timezones and our free time doesn't always overlap. I know that we live in deeply stressful times. I'm not expecting at any point to suddenly start drawing in audiences in the double digits. I don't want big crowds, I just want people to talk to while I'm working and thinking.

But...it's just too broad and consistent for me to think that it's nothing more than coincidence.

I post stream announcements on FurAffinity, Twitter, and more than a dozen different Discord servers. For all that, I'm lucky if I get more than two viewers at a time, let alone viewers who stay active through the whole stream. I have tried just about every permutation of time of day and day of the week and there's no discernible difference in attendance. I have a great many acquaintances, those who say over and over that they care, but many of them will go weeks or months without showing up and engaging in discussion. This is the trend I've been dealing with for years, and it's gotten to such a point that I can't handle my frustration anymore.

Last week, I went to do my annual birthday stream (a day late) in which I play movies I feel strongly about and then do a playthrough of Journey. It seemed to start reasonably well with a fair few people showing up and getting involved. But then that quickly petered off over the course of the first movie, and for the majority of the second movie I was just sitting entirely by myself in silence. Any number of thoughts I might have wanted to express during that time are lost forever now. I ended up stopping the stream early.

Yesterday, I wanted to try to do something relaxing and have a gaming stream. I put up a poll on Twitter to see what I should play and seven people voted on it. Then I started up and waited for anyone to come in. I was waiting for an hour and a half, and no one--not a one of the seven people who voted on the poll--showed up. I stopped the stream with my day effectively shot to hell.

I don't know what I can do to address any of this. I have tried asking in the past if I need to change my activity or content and I've never gotten any definitive answers. I see that my peers regularly pull in crowds of the same few viewers and I have no idea what I'm supposed to do to get the same results. I do everything that I can to be active and provide content that can be engaging for others.

It seems more and more that the only solution is to just give up and stop streaming...but I can't do that, I'm too reliant upon it. I need to stream to be able to get writing done with any amount of consistency. Too much of my life revolves around sharing through streams. I'm at a total impasse.

And none of this is even broaching the separate but similar issues that I have in regard to the reception of my writing.

I'm not sure what's keeping me here in my online circles.

I just want to have connections with people.

I want to share interests.

I want to engage in discussions.

I want to make a difference.

I haven't felt any of that in a long, long time.

I don't know what it means to be friends with someone anymore.

Lots of acquaintances tell me that we're close with little action to back that up.

It's far too consistently the case that I sit around getting no activity.

Every time I think I'm going to have a step forward I just bleed myself dry for nothing.

It feels like there's nothing for me here anymore.

But I don't have anywhere else to go.

I don't know what I'm doing wrong.

It's pretty popular to talk about The Prince of Egypt, the big epic movie Dreamworks did during that period when they were still trying to do traditionally animated movies, before all the big companies just gave up on that entirely. A lot of people like to say that this is the best movie Dreamworks has ever put out.

I see far less discussion about its direct-to-video prequel, Joseph: King of Dreams. I remember seeing commercials for it, long ago in the before times, but I never saw it, or The Prince of Egypt for that matter, as a kid.

But now that I am an adult and I can freely browse the movie section at my local Target, I can buy whatever movies I happen to be interested in, and so I was able to finally see both of these movies.

And I can understand why everyone speaks so highly about The Prince of Egypt and why no one ever talks about Joseph: King of Dreams.

Yet, despite this, I find that the latter occupies a lot more headspace within my mind. Not necessarily because I think it's better. I just feel like there's more to say about it. So let's say things about it.

Joseph is...not a very good movie. It's direct-to-video and that's abundantly apparent at all times. The animation is a lot cheaper and mostly uninteresting aside from some of the dream sequences (the ones that don't make use of awful dated CGI). The music is all this extraordinarily bland shmaltzy junk that was dated even for the year 2000, most of it in line with the style of the Phil Collins songs that were in Disney's Tarzan. Most of the characters are paper-thin--Joseph's love interest barely shares any scenes with him, before or after their marriage. It's got a lot of the same problems of adapting this gritty text into a children's movie that The Prince of Egypt had--I sure am glad that we're supposed to see Potiphar as a good guy after all his owning of slaves and leaving Joseph to rot in prison for years, to say nothing of what Joseph must get up to after he becomes Vizier. And the cat in the commercial trailer that you'd think would be the standard animal companion is only in like one scene. Shameful.

What strikes out to me most though is how, as an adaptation, it's so...generic. It's basically just a straight retelling of the story of Joseph from his birth up to the Hebrews of Canaan coming to Egypt, with only a few elements streamlined for simplicity. The only significant additions are in the bland songs playing over montages and the visual representations that come inherently with this being in a new medium. There is nothing about this movie that really marks it as being a product from Dreamworks rather than any other animation studio.

I know that people like to complain about the way Disney adapts stories in its movies, about oversanitization and stripping things out, but I find that to be a bland argument that disregards how much effort goes into adapting a story to a different medium. Having seen some half-dozen Phelous videos by now about varying different versions of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, it's clear to me that not being true to the original book is far from the biggest problem with the Disney version of it. The majority of these other studios that put out their versions of folk stories and fairy tales and myths exhibit a bare minimum level of imagination in how to put a spin on them, so you get things like the Goodtimes and Dingo Pictures versions of Hunchback which follow almost all of the beats from the original story aside from tacking on a more child-friendly ending. Usually when they do, it's something utterly inane--like the Golden Films version of Hunchback, where Esmerelda Melody animates musical instruments with her singing and Frollo Jean-Claude is Quasimodo's brother and Quasimodo isn't a hunchback at all and becomes handsome in the end by standing up straight and brushing his hair out of his eyes. When you're adapting a particularly old story like these, it's important to update them in such a way that they can be more easily digestible to their new audience.

No discussion of this movie is really complete without addressing The Prince of Egypt, so let's look at how it acts as an adaptation of the original story of Exodus.

While I have some misgivings about the tonal and moral dissonance in this story as it's presented, I can't deny that Dreamworks really went above and beyond in its efforts on this movie, especially in regard to the conflict between Moses and Rameses. Where the biblical stories focus mostly on collective groups, the Hebrews and the Egyptians and any other nemeses they face, of God versus the wicked, here we really see that condensed into the struggle between two brothers. Moses and Rameses are both in their own way having to live up to their heritage--Moses as a Hebrew preserved from slaughter, now rising up to save his people, and Rameses as an Egyptian royal, desperate to live up to his legacy. In the original text, as far as I know, there is never a name ascribed to the Pharaoh who oppresses the Hebrews, he is always simply "Pharaoh", because in effect it doesn't really matter. The Pharaoh who succeeded the Pharaoh who was patron to Joseph forgot the promise to do good to the Hebrews, and every Pharaoh since has taken it as a given to do the same (this is why dynasties are bad, kids). The title of Pharoah in of itself, and all that is expected of one who holds it, functionally acts as the antagonist of the story, and thus Rameses inherits that mantle from his father once he comes to power. Moses might have even been in danger of that happening to him as well, had his eyes not been opened to the truth of his past and the atrocities that had been committed by his adoptive father.

It's in light of all this...that it's baffling there was so little effort put into Joseph. Where Prince feels like an earnest effort to outdo Disney, as so much of the Dreamworks catalog was in these early days, the golden era of Jeffrey Katzenberg, petty asshole, Joseph comes off more akin to the half-assed work you'd see from one of those mockbuster studios or the average direct-to-video Disney sequel. Going too far in following in the mouse's footsteps, I suppose.

But there is one thing about Joseph, this story which sees a man haplessly flung about from one plot point to the next by the whims of fate through fortune and misfortune, that I find interesting to consider.

Who is the villain of this story?

The obvious answer would be Joseph's brothers who sold him into slavery out of petty jealousy, but they're absent for most of the movie and by the time they reappear they pose no real threat to him and already regret their past actions. There's Potiphar's wife Zuleika who attempts to seduce Joseph and then has him arrested on accusation of rape, but then she just drops from the movie completely. Potiphar himself can be seen as having some negative and antagonistic qualities but he is always framed as a relatively reasonable individual. Even the Pharaoh, in contrast to Rameses or his father, acts justly and rewards Joseph for his actions.

There is no singular physical antagonist in this story.

The villain of Joseph: King of Dreams is sin.

This is a story of sin and the temptation of humans to commit it. Over and over again, we see that the characters in this story are tempted to do evil unto others and give in to their desires. Joseph's brothers leave him for dead so that they no longer have to be in his shadow. Zuleika tries to seduce him because there's nothing he, as a slave, can do to stop her. Potiphar imprisons him out of anger and shame. Each of them, in their own way, comes to regret their actions, but in most cases it's far too late to undo the damage that has been done. Then at the end, after all that, in spite of all the strife he has been put through, Joseph himself is the one in the position of power and the one who is presented with the opportunity to exact his revenge, to see someone brought low before him and made to suffer. This is particularly evident when his brothers bring forth his new younger brother Benjamin, who hadn't even done anything to Joseph aside from existing as the new youngest sibling, effectively Joseph's replacement, and yet he singles him out as if intending to bring punishment to him in particular. It's only then, in the final hour as his brothers prostrate themselves before him, that Joseph comes to the realization that sin begets nothing but pain and bitterness, and he reveals who he truly is so that the family can come together again. It's topics like this which don't often come up in children's media of this sort, not merely revenge but the notion of giving in wholly to evil.

It's really not a great movie, and I don't know that I can even recommend giving it a look unless you have some free streaming access to it, it's just not that entertaining. To me, though, it's fascinating to think about the creative processes that went into it, for better and for worse.

I've come to the decision that worrying about commissions is severely detrimental to me.

I've been unable to touch the queue in part because I don't have enough time and also because of overwhelming guilt about how long it's taken, which begets a self-perpetuating cycle of anxiety.

The fact of the matter is that I don't have the energy or output necessary to work on projects both for myself and for others and it doesn't feel sufficiently rewarding to me.

I apologize to everyone who might have hoped to commission me, but I can't cope with the stress or the frustration anymore.

I also apologize to those for whom I'd already started working, I just don't have it in me to go back to those stories at this point.

Maybe I'll try again in the future but frankly I can't make any promises.

I feel alone.

I have for a long time now.

I don't know what I can do about it.

My work was supposed to mean something.

All of my efforts have amounted to nothing.

There is no one I can confide in.

There is no one who can make a difference.

I have poured out so much of myself.

The void has taken all of it.

Soon there will be nothing left.

You are huge.

Your girth dwarfs galaxies. Your sexual excess douses stars. Planets crumble beneath your feet. The fabric of reality is pulled apart at the seams by your own hands.

Now what?

You'd might as well keep getting even hugererer, right?

===

Bigness unavoidably goes hand in hand with inconvenience.

Even when we handwave health complications, the unavoidable fact is that simply existing at large sizes poses considerable difficulty on every aspect of life. Whether you're absurdly obese or your tits are the size of weather balloons or you have a cannon between your legs, you're going to have to deal with a lot of problems in your everyday routine. Problems like walking or reaching in front of you or fitting through doorways or seeing your own damn feet. It's not all just being horny, there are actual struggles that have to be acknowledged.

And that's fine. I like exploring how characters have to deal with their size. It's a significant part of the appeal for me.

But there gets to be a tipping point--an event horizon, you might call it. At this point it becomes apparent that a character can't really do much of anything aside from...existing. And getting bigger. If a character is a blob of fat or a mountain of muscle or nothing more than a series of circles attached to a blip of a body at the center, their options become extremely limited.

I can't help but feel that a lot of furries don't consider the logistical implications that come from extreme sizes such as these. When I'm doing commissions (a ridiculous notion, I know) I dread any time I'm given a prompt for a story that involves excessive quantities of growth because it inevitably devolves to a cycle of "and then they got bigger." Straight macro growth is the only real exception to this, but then it's just substituting for more and more grandiose descriptions of cosmic destruction. I always worry that it's just going to seem repetitive but the customer is generally pleased with it, so what can I do about it?

A lot of this is on me. I don't want to come off as egotistical when I say this but I can't avoid spending a lot of time thinking out situations in stories. It's why I struggle with writing out basic ideas when I have urges for them, I can't turn my brain off enough for that, I need to plot out the full scenario. I don't dislike extreme sizes, I just have a hard time wrapping my head around such an idea and thinking of anything meaningful to do with it, I need to be in a particular mood or see something that really gives me the itch. I feel like this may be in part why I've started branching out to weirder concepts and more niche forms of expansion, merely "big" in of itself isn't enough for me anymore, I need something more varied.

What frustrates me though is the consistent feeling that others are just going to scoff at me whenever I raise the notion that I would rather not go bigger. The idea that I would rather think about these scenarios than dive headlong into mindless growth is met with a response of "Why bother?" I hate any time I post something in a Discord server, even if it's not my own work, and someone promptly responds "bigger" as if it's not good enough the way it is.

And I don't even have the time here to go into the subset of people for whom "bigger" invariably carries the implication of "bigger than you."

I don't want to begrudge anyone for their interests, but I can't tolerate when it comes with this sycophantic fervor that actively denies the option for pursuing anything more complex than "haha boobi get bigger brrrrrr." It only ever serves to make me feel inadequate, like I'm wasting my time with the things that do interest me, and I don't need any more of that feeling than I have already.

After much needless procrastinating I made myself a Ko-Fi, for those who might be interested in supporting me without the pressure of monthly donations that come from Patreon.

https://ko-fi.com/nonuberis

In light of last night I feel it's necessary to discuss this to some extent.

I am very aware that FurAffinity is a rather lackluster and unreliable website to use for uploading art in a number of ways.

I am also aware that there is a great deal of shadiness behind the scenes.

I don't want to excuse any of that.

But the fact of the matter is that this is the only site where I have any amount of traction. I hear people talking about just leaving like it's no big deal, but that's not something I can just do at the drop of a hat. Any time I've tried branching out to another website, my account always ends up stagnating and nothing comes of it.

Worse still because everyone came to the cosmic brain decision that the hot new place to go to is Twitter, an absolute hellhole website that I would argue is even worse to use as a repository for art, even if it weren't for the swarms of reactionary piranhas ready to tear you to shreds at a moment's notice, and I can't even use it for writing at all.

I've frankly grown to despise the snobbish attitude of people who make a big deal about how they put FA behind them, as if the new places they've gone to are so much better, as if it's so easy for anyone to do the same. It always feels like an implicit indictment of me for not following that trend, as if I haven't been trying to put myself out there to no avail for years now.

So yes, I'm going to continue to use this site for as long as I possibly can, be it until I finally have some other place I can call home or until the coding falls apart at the seams.

If you want to see mostly retweets and the occasional update or announcement, you can follow me on Twitter. https://twitter.com/NonUberis

If you want to get direct notifications of my streams, you can follow me on Picarto. https://picarto.tv/NonUberis

If you're still interested in pony content, I post art on Derpibooru under the tag NonUberis and I post stories on Fimfiction. https://www.fimfiction.net/user/330130/Non+Uberis

If you really want to go the extra mile in supporting me, you can pledge to me on Patreon and see early previews of my writing for $2.50 per month. https://www.patreon.com/user?u=273837

I don't really know what to think about my writing this past year. I have managed to accomplish a great deal and I have created a great many stories I am proud of. At the same time, I stalled out completely on doing commission work, some of which might be blamed on the pandemic, but the overarching problem is a growing sense of disillusionment. I'm starting to feel more and more desire to reach to greater heights with my writing, but I don't have the capacity to work on my own projects at the same time as I'm doing work for others. I don't know what I'm going to do to rationalize this.

For now, all I have is the content that I did this year, and I'd like to think that there's a lot of good stuff here.

As a reminder, if you are interested in my work, please consider supporting me on Patreon. Patrons get access to updates on stories before they're publicly posted.

January:

She turned to the side (far to the side) to pull the door open and walked in. The smell of gasoline was at a relative minimum at the start of the day, before the engines could be turned on, leaving only the coolness of the air conditioning, whirring loudly in the summer heat. That was in addition to the low grumbling and muttering that came from the pale bandicoot on the other side of the room. Tawna couldn’t see her face, but it was enough to identify the distinctive green and purple color scheme of her tank top and pants.

Liz. Tight-assed Liz with her tight little ass up in the air as she bent over.

Yes, this would be a great place to start.

“Hey there, Liz,” Tawna called out, announcing her presence with both her voice and the loud clopping of her shoes against the concrete floor as she crossed the room.

WHAP. WHAP. WHAP.

(GLOOSH. GLOOSH.)

-Competitive Spirit


February:

They came together and embraced. Non’s breasts filled the span of his arms, squeezing as he reached past them to hold Non’s shoulders, and he did the same. Non had to straddle Non’s cock to get in close, grinding his own bulge against the meaty girth, and it pulsed in response to the stimulation. Non’s lips were engulfed by Non’s lips as they kissed, but he still put in everything that he had.

It was a perfect moment, not a care in the world.

Then they started to make their way to the front of the store. Non had a bit of difficulty with handling his cart since his bosom got in the way of the hand-grip. Non didn’t have to worry about that, but walking was difficult in general on account of the junk between his legs, forcing him into a shuffling gait, so Non let him walk in front to set their speed. It also let him appreciate the shape of Non’s ass a little better, round buttocks crammed into his shorts, tail wagging over top. He wouldn’t mind getting a handful of those, even if they were dwarfed by his own.

And it was as they languidly passed along the aisles that Non looked at one of the shirts hanging on a rack they went by. It was a nice solid black color, and he ran his hand over the silky fabric. His fingers touched on the price tag. There were numbers and gobbledygook about sales and registration. $19.99.

A thought occurred to Non: “I wonder how much all of this stuff is going to cost.” The notion of expenses had never occurred to him at any moment when he had been gathering all of them to bring to the fitting room. He wasn’t supposed to worry about things like that.

But the idea was there now, and it proceeded to spread through him.

-Anomaly


March:

As the train came to a stop in front of them, Lyra Heartstrings felt a sparking tingle run through her horn.

“What-?”

A pulse of light flashed all around them and a dull drone filled their ears, the two ponies staggering as their perception of the world was momentarily cut off.

A single sensation rocked through them all at once.

Lyra Heartstrings felt compression, weighing down, spreading outward.

Octavia felt heat, building and billowing and rising, filling every inch.

Then the moment was over, leaving them to reel.

-Convergence


April:

As you glance over the earthen walls, you notice an irregularity among them: a path of divots in the surface. Hand- and footholds. A makeshift ladder for climbing in and out of the crevasse, once used, perhaps, by those who had maintained and regulated the bridge.

You make a start toward it. You can’t wait to see the world above.

A hollow chuckling noise comes from behind you moments before the air keens wildly.

You throw yourself to the ground and in the process feel only a sliver of metal scraping at the skin on your back. It stings and burns, but it is preferable to being sliced open with your spine severed. You land harshly and tumble, your joints aching, but you are quick to plant your feet again, holding yourself low to the ground while your fist clutches the sword hilt, and you snarl as you turn about to face your attacker.

“Oh, a lively one. You’re definitely not one of ours.”

The voice is rough, gravelly, grating in your ears, playing at a mockery of erudition. He is a tall figure, wearing brass armor that gleams in the dull light, the shape of fangs molded over the chest and stomach, like a gaping mouth, with a curved ivory object hanging from his belt. In one hand he carries a weapon with a long handle and a broad, curved blade at the tip—a glaive, you think. Leathery wings extend from behind his back like a grand cape, with holes worn in the aged translucent membranes. He has a toothy muzzle and horns that curl out and forward, his skin a bleached yellow white like bone, and his eyes are dark, but unlike the undead soldiers you can recognize some definition to them, sclera with fiery irises.

He gazes at you with a cruel grin.

You know that grin.

-The Well of Life: Drink Deep


May:

Gossamer Gleam awoke to discover that she was pregnant.

But she didn’t dwell on this for very long. As soon as she was conscious, she was already trying to throw off the blankets and get herself out of bed.

The pregnancy was not so willing to allow itself to be easily overlooked, though. Even pushing and huffing and grunting it took a phenomenal effort to get herself over the side of the bed, and she nearly toppled to the floor under the sudden drastic increase in weight. Her belly hung heavily past her waistline and down to her knees, filling the span of her legs and spreading them to the sides, as if she had swallowed a yoga ball. Her breasts were excessively full as well, taut and straining, resting heavily upon those upper surfaces.

She winced and moaned as she rose to her hooves and stumbled, pressing her belly against the wall. The insides of her thighs turned wet and sticky, grinding together. The thing (or things) inside her stirred – some life that she could not comprehend.

She should have known, but the information wasn’t in her head.

The unicorn didn’t waste time with putting on a gown. She only felt that she had to move.

She didn’t take the time to look outside the window and see the world outside, pitch black, darker than night, inky, dripping.

-Blur


June:

“I recall asking if you would want to join me, for old times’ sake. Waking up at the crack of dawn—to make the crack of dawn, you might say. Just like we did every day. And now here you are, still in bed, and it is past noon.”

Silence. After a few seconds Celestia rolled back to the other side with a drowsy groan, even if it meant turning her face to the open window.

“You know, sister,” Luna said, raising her voice as she looked up at the great swollen shape on the bed, “I may not govern the realm of sleep anymore, but I did not relinquish any of those powers to Twilight either, and as such I am very much aware that you are awake.” Her horn lit up with a magical aura and the blanket was yanked down, uncovering the swelling curves that made up Celestia’s form, white-furred flesh exposed to the air in its entirety.

“Nnn…nooo…!” the alicorn cried out like a petulant filly. She reached blindly and desperately for the blankets, but Luna kept the cloth out of reach. “It’s so comfy!”

“Gods, it is a good thing you are deposed now, could you imagine what it would have been like for one of our retainers to come in and see you like this?” The other mare shook her head and clicked her tongue in disappointment. “It would only be a matter of time before it found its way to the headline of the Canterlot Gazette: ‘Expectant Princess Sleeps Through Whole Day. When reached for comment, her reply was “I was too comfy to get my fat ass out of bed!”’”

“Alright, alright, I get it,” Celestia grumbled with a huff. She laid there weakly on the bed a while longer, huddled around the warmth of her midsection, before she fought with her unwieldy body to get into a sitting posture on the edge of the mattress, grunting and groaning in a decidedly un-princess-like manner all the while. This was appropriate enough as it had been several months since either she or Luna had been a princess of Equestria. They had both done quite a lot that could be described as un-princess-like.

-Summer Days


July:

My attention turned to the hall around me. There wasn’t much to see, only the other elevators around me, bright yellowish lamps hanging from the walls, the floor covered in a rich carpet that wasn’t stained by orange fluids. To the left there was a set of tall double doors, dark wood slabs. A plaque above it read simply “CEO”.

My destination. I could grin again as I tugged on the collar of my suit and walked forward.

Then I stumbled and stopped and shuddered and sputtered.

I’m sure it probably looked weird to anyone who would have been watching. Like I just felt my heart seize up all of a sudden. The way I doubled over was as if the five steps I had taken were equivalent to running a mile.

I had suddenly felt something. Pulling, tensing, weightlessness. Vertigo.

It had been too easy to make those steps. It was like the floor was sloping away beneath me. Down toward the doors. Toward the abyss.

But that was ridiculous. I looked ahead of me now and I could see the office doors ahead of me just like before, as they had always been, naturally. The floor was completely flat, I didn’t need a level to tell me that. It was just an ordinary office building.

An office building owned by a shady woman whose employees called her “Mistress”.

I shuffled the rest of the way, keeping my feet close to the ground.

-Interview


August:

Rarity momentarily felt the weightlessness of freefall before her hooves came to rest with a heavy thump upon the floor. Once again, a tremulous wobble shook through her form, but her expression remained as stern and stoic as before. She was used to this. This was very much a part of her assignment.

The Mistress usually had the decency to give her subordinates advance warning when she required something of them.

She did not, however, have the patience to wait for them to navigate the expansive halls of the castle to reach wherever she was waiting, especially a pony as encumbered as Rarity, so usually she would opt to teleport them directly to her.

The room the unicorn now found herself in was dark, only lit by a single ethereal blue candle on a table in front of her, casting long shadows over the walls. Her eyes would take a while longer to adjust to the gloom, but she was well-acquainted with the arrangements and the décor. Gothic furniture in blues and silvers and blacks stood against the walls, eerie twisted and curling shapes that in the low light appeared to be squat ghoulish figures, bowed in reverence. Further tapestries were hung around the perimeter, most of them depicting scenes of a dark pony standing over others—a white mare with a rainbow mane being a prominent recurring figure among them. Far in the shadows of the back of the room there was the shape of a sprawling bed, a low, hulking silhouette.

There was a mirror to the side in which Rarity could see her own reflection in profile—or, at least, a portion of it, as the glass surface wasn’t broad enough to fit her entirely. It would be difficult at a first glance to identify where the center of her mass was, where her skeletal structure began, buried as it was underneath vast acres of flesh. Her bosom jutted out farther in front of herself than the span of her arms, and the vast shelf of her thighs and buttocks did the same for the sides and rear. A ponderous gut hung from her midsection, past her waist and down to her knees, thick legs creasing against each other, swaddled in sleeves of flab, much like her arms, choking whatever musculature was underneath. She would have had a great deal of difficulty getting any work done if she didn’t have the assistance of magic. She wouldn’t allow anything of the sort to get in the way of her and her responsibilities, though, and she wouldn’t let her bulk diminish her professional demeanor. She wore a uniform tailor-made especially for her (the latest in a long line of attempts to keep up with her weight), a combination of a coat and a sort of leotard underneath that buttoned up over her front, regal enough to disregard that there was nothing over the broad slopes of her legs. Her purple mane and tail were tied up in buns, and the doughy plumpness of her face couldn’t entirely detract from the severity of her gaze.

Rarity took a great deal of pleasure in her appearance, not that she was likely to show much indication of it in public or even most private venues, as her reputation and position were of far greater importance. The ways in which she could use her appearance to further her reputation and position were the most important of all.

-Night Service


September:

I turned to the left, the north, back the way I had come. I had managed to cover quite a lot of ground without fully realizing it, the houses far in the distance, the like small colonies of colorful mushrooms. I almost wondered if I’d be able to make the walk back and return to the house on the other side of the road before the dark and the damp could come down. Maybe that wouldn’t have been such a bad thing—I couldn’t be bothered to go swimming but I could still get drenched in water in other ways. In fact, maybe I should keep going further south just to spend more time here.

I turned back to the right and I saw the unicorn.

She was standing not even ten feet away. I was immediately conscious that she wasn’t a horse despite superficially resembling one; the barrel was more compact, the legs longer with cloven hooves nestled in the sand, the tail closer to that of a lion, a long whip ending in a furred tuft. Her form was immaculate, pale silver, slender and tall, so much that I had to noticeably crane my neck upward to look at her face. Her mane billowed in the ocean breeze, snow white rippling prismatically with the colors of the rainbow, as she stared out toward the water. Her face seemed calm and composed, regal even, in a way that no ordinary animal could be. The horn extending from her forehead, like polished, gleaming seashell, twisting around itself, glowed with a soft but deeply enticing corona of light, a beacon that I thought must have been visible from miles away.

I’m not sure how I knew she was female, just from this immediate look at her standing in profile. I suppose many would assume that a unicorn must be female, but in seeing her I somehow just knew it, in the core of my being.

There was a moment in which it seemed that time was frozen. I felt as if my brain was stalling out like a car engine. I could only stare wide-eyed. The greatest advantage of having to wear face coverings, though, was that of obscuring one’s expression, hiding any amount of dumbfounded mouth-gaping I might have been doing.

There were surely any number of things I should have said or done. This was a momentous occasion for my life—hell, the whole world, to see a mythical creature before my very eyes. I should have asked her about herself. I should have tried to ascertain that she was real. I really should have taken out my phone and snapped a picture before anything else. Or maybe I should have just continued to do nothing, to stand there and watch, as if to do otherwise would be to cause this moment to vanish and be lost forever.

-You and Me, Always Forever


October:

A pop in your ears prompts you to wake.

You immediately convulse as the hunger reasserts its presence, rips through you without remorse. Any sustenance that might have been gained from the Husk was burned and then some by the mending of your skull and brains. Ichor and spittle fill your mouth. Your shoulders ache; something had been yanking on your arms, threatening to dislodge them from their sockets, while you were (dead) unconscious. Rough and uneven points are digging into your flesh—a bed of stones.

You feel as if your body is hollow, threatening to collapse in on itself like one of those derelict houses. You are in dire need of nourishment. Fuel. Energy. Souls.

You are still slipping away.

You are peeling.

Your skin is peeling.

Your skin is burning.

The reek of smoke and burnt flesh fills your nostrils.

It is apparent that you are on fire.

-The Well of Life: The Village


November:

Alice has always hated the coming of winter.

This could be attributed to a number of things. The disappearance of color from the world as plants withered, the shortening of days, the general inconvenience of snow. The pleasant atmosphere of Goldenrod City waned as activity died down, people growing less and less willing to go outside. It was just a bummer in general, something that not even the holidays could fully alleviate.

But the greatest and worst factor of all was the cold.

It should come as no surprise for a Garchomp, a species of Pokémon known for detesting all things related to ice. She had loathed the months leading up to the end of the year ever since she had been a child, when it also coincided with the beginning of school semesters and the approach of midterm exams. Sure, she had always been a physically active sort, but before the blood could start pumping on a morning run there was always the creeping chill lapping at her, seeping into her skin, down to the bone. Even as she had grown older and become bolstered by added layers of insulating flesh, especially around the vitals of the chest, the cold always managed to lance straight through to her core.

Of course, the growth was in some ways a detriment under these circumstances. With every year that went by, it would come time to put on her sweaters and long pants, only to find that they were just a little too tight. Even in Goldenrod City, the finest plus-sized (and beyond) tailors could only work so quickly, and so, invariably, she would have to endure some extent of time wearing clothes that either didn’t quite fit her or were inappropriate for the colder climate. Thus she now found herself wearing a tight pair of jeans with holes that had been ripped through them around her thigh-spikes and a sweater that couldn’t even begin to adequately contain the bulk of her front, a crevice of red cleavage peeking through at the top and the yellow underside of her gut at the bottom. And she had to wear shoes to keep her feet away from the cold stone and pavement, unprotected even by the thick skin and scales and calluses; at least those still fit, but she detested how uncomfortable they were, and she still went through them fairly regularly as her clawed toes wore away at the material.

-Heating


December:

There were blinds hanging on Tina’s side of the double doors that separated her room from the trio’s. She could have peeked through them to see what was happening when there were loud creaks and squeals of springs as someone landed on one of the beds and the two masculine voices began to speak to each other in guttural, hungering tones. She could have, but she had no desire to see anything of that sort, and she’d prefer to hear none of it either, if at all possible. So her own bed creaked, however slightly, as she surrendered the gentle warmth of blankets and mattress and stole across the room in her pajamas, picking up her phone along the way, not to those covered doors but to the door that led out onto the side deck.

It certainly didn’t help that she had just been in such a cozy place, or that she was wearing naught but the thin cloth of her pajamas, but the cold of night was instantly overwhelming. The pleasantly warm day that they had experienced before suddenly felt like a distant memory. Worse still when she sat down at the little table tucked into the corner of the deck, and the metal which conducted heat so much better than skin or even the wood panel floor was even colder still. Maybe she should go back in and grab a blanket.

No, it was no longer an option. Even through the far thicker outer wall of the house, she could still hear the faint echo of the passionate moaning that was taking place within. She wasn’t going to allow herself to hear any more than that for even a second longer if she could afford to. Instead she would have to sit here shivering until the commotion died down. That gave her plenty of time to take in the environment from this new perspective.

When her eyes adjusted, she was able to dimly take in the sight of a world of dulled blues and blacks, all other color drained out from her surroundings. She could see the reflection of the sky cast on the murky pond out beyond the fence that marked the neighborhood’s perimeter. Trees and bushes were now turned into hunched shadowy shapes, branches reaching toward the heavens. If there was any movement, it was too small and slight for her to detect—which was probably the intent of most animals that were active during this time.

She could still see the watchtower clearly. A great black spire rising up out of the sand, its peak high above the horizon. She wondered how long it had sat there, derelict, untended to, since the heyday of its original purpose had passed. Would there still be shards of glass from the broken windows scattered about inside, or buried among the sand outside, waiting to be eroded by the years into so much more dust? How many tourists, visiting this house, had sat here in the same seat as her, wondering what purpose the tower might have once had, or even what purpose it could have had in the days since, until whenever it could receive that renovation that everyone so desired?

-Rising Tide Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, and Epilogue

It’s time to talk about making some changes for the Decaverse.

I had always hoped for the Decaverse to show the development of a world changing over time. I wanted to show the rise of Decadence and her empire and all the forces that would come into conflict as a result thereof. This was the case when I was just going to write about it and it remained the case when it was decided to transition back to being a shared roleplay venture again, if not even more so now that there’s the opportunity for multiple parties to collaborate. I wanted to give people a chance to have a hand in shaping this setting.

The problem, however, is that this is hard. Like, very hard. Getting large groups of people to come together for concerted roleplay events is a whole lot easier said than done. It’s also rather limiting to try to start at the beginning of the setting’s history and work forward because the setting doesn’t have as many options available right away. The result of this is that events can only be organized every few months and at this rate it would likely take at least another year for anything significant to happen, and in that time we’d be having to work with a far smaller cast of players because the current limitations are too, well, limiting.

So in an effort to avert this, I’ve decided that it would be better to just skip ahead in the timeline. This brings us to a point where the Crystal Empire has advanced more and is freer in terms of its content. In addition to the setting itself, there are also options for more freeform play that can be done with characters who aren’t actually fully integrated. I’m hoping that this way it will be easier to encourage people to just do things instead of having to worry about all the minutia. I’m still hopeful that this can be a collaborative effort that everyone can enjoy being a part of.

If you are interested in taking part, you can find more information on the Decaverse’s F-List profile or by joining our Discord server.

Please don't pretend to be invested in me.

Don't tell me you care if you don't actually want to engage with me.

Y'all made sure to vote for Milotic this year, right? The only non-Bernie candidate that isn't a crusty old white person with nothing more than self-interest on their minds? We'd have social and economic stability a lot quicker if everyone just had big snake tits. That's definitely how it works.

Anyhow though, you may have noticed that I've been doing a lot of writing streams for the past few weeks. That's because I've been working exhaustively on my newest story, Rising Tide, which has become the longest project I've completed by a sizeable margin in five years. It is a transformation-themed story about the encroaching doom of Non and Milotic, but make no mistake that at its core it is rooted in horror more than fetish.

As a word of warning: much like "You and Me, Always Forever", this story takes place in the setting of the real world during 2020 and there are extensive mentions of the COVID-19 pandemic. Unlike that story, however, this one also features occasional bursts of political commentary courtesy of a far-left-leaning protagonist. It is here that I put all my cards on the table, for those of you who may care about that.

The first chapter is uploaded here and further chapters will be uploaded on a daily basis.

It took a long time to create this and I'm hoping that it can get as much traction as it can.

As a reminder, my content can be seen early on my Patreon; patrons have been receiving updates for this story since it began.