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@anotherwarren
I have a new favorite reaction image.
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As promised, why Morgan and Reyes' dynamic interests me more than Morgan and Emma.
The root of it is how these two seem to be on parallel tracks in terms of their character arcs. Morgan is someone who, not even is convinced she's a bad person, but has invested so much of herself in the idea of her own inhumanity. She is convinced that she is less than human and that she's just pretending to be normal to survive in between 'feeding the hole' inside her. She is convinced that she's incapable of loving another person
And yet, she is almost always acting irrationally, for others and having a positive impact in their lives. David, Carlos, Serra, Sosuke, Fran, she goes to bat for all of them, even at great personal risk to herself. She waves this off as personal interest or just the desire to win, but we know that's bullshit. The text makes it blatantly clear that the person she lies to most to is herself. Sure this of itself doesn't make her a good personâ˘, but it makes her human. Something she keeps trying to tell herself she's not because what she was brought up to think being human is does not line up with humanity. So despite viewing herself as a monster, she's a net positive in several people's lives.
Contrast this with Reyes, who wishes beyond hell and high water to be a good person. To be a respectable representative of the state who brings wrongdoers to justice and makes the world safer for everyone. The dream many o' bright eyed rookies join the force to try and fulfill. We see this drive to go good in everything she does as a homicide detective. How seriously she takes her job, how much she seems to idolize London and by how much she despises anything she thinks is an obstruction to justice.
Of course this desire clashes severely with the fact that, well... she's a cop. A cop in a cyberpunk surveillance state to boot Her job isn't to do good. It's to uphold the status quo. The dream of cops being the heroes has always been just that. Dreams. Fantasies stirred up by copaganda films and tv shows. And Reyes is always chafing against that reality in her job as well as her own temper and other shortcomings. They put her in homicide to begin with so that no one else would have to deal with her, she was that frustrating to work with. And despite it being her job description, she doesn't solve any of the murders in the game. In fact, she almost put an innocent man in jail in her fervor to try and catch Heartbreak.
The one who DOES solve all those murders is the defense attorney she so often antagonizes
So we have one character whose convinced she's an unfeeling monster, yet who does good for others in her life, be they close friends or perfect strangers. And we have another who wants to be the hero but is hamstrung at every turn by the fact that her chosen profession will mean she'll likely just cause more harm than good. Like I said, parallel tracks.
So this likely means that both Morgan and Reyes are going to come to a crossroad at some point. One where they realize that their perceptions of themselves just isn't the reality. And they'll each be met with a choice. They can either accept the truth and adjust their paradigm to become better, or at least happier people.
OR...
-they can double down and commit themselves to the sunk cost fallacy to the detriment of themselves and others. And with how Of the Devil is going so far, either choice is entirely possible for them.
This is all well and good when it comes to them as individual characters, but it's when these two interact that things start getting fun. Sure, Reyes is mostly just a 'boss fight' in episode 0 but their dynamic really picks up afterwards. They demonstrate to be on similar wavelengths multiple times, they're very good at getting each other's goats, but what really gets me going is the quieter moments.
There are moments in episode 1 and 2 where Reyes, despite herself, expresses a moment of vulnerability with Morgan. And crucially, Morgan doesn't burn her for it. Even if she doesn't have much to say or would rather be doing anything else, she listens to Reyes when she doesn't have to and doesn't cast judgement.
@farahreyes has a fantastic post showing how Morgan's relationship with Reyes actually mirrors her relationship with David. It's one of the reasons I really got invested in their dynamic. And it's true. David, postmortem, values Morgan's friendships for reasons we see demonstrated between her and Reyes in real time.
These two are becoming increasingly entangled, which means that their individual character arcs, namely the crossroads each of them will face, are definitely going to impact the other. We already see hints of this in the last episode. With Reyes seeing Morgan bringing two murders to justice where the state was ready to convict the wrong guy, with how vulnerable she's already been around Morgan and not getting burned by it, and with whatever shady secret London's got that threatens to erode her idolization of him, everything's gearing up to push Reyes closer to Morgan. And Morgan is going to be met with the realization that people genuinely like her.
Perhaps... they'll become better or worse... together? 0w0
But me getting shippy over two disaster women aside, compare this to Morgan's relationship with Emma. I mean, sure, Morgan is certainly obsessed with Emma to a degree, and Emma is becoming increasingly obsessed with Heartbreak (at least the version of Heartbreak she's building up in her head). I'm sure that's interesting to some people, but in order for me to find their dynamic interesting, I'd have to find both of them interesting. And... I'm sorry, but Emma is literally, canonically, a true crime girlie. That's just... very dull to me.
Anyway, thank you for listening to my ramshackle dissertation. I'm going to bed and snuggling my wife. Thank you.
Calling it now
London is the first to figure Morgan out.
Calling it now:
Morgan kills London after he's figured her out, before he can/does act on it.
Calling it now:
Morgan kills London (probably after he's figured her out), but it ends up being the key to someone else (probably Emma) figuring her out.
Calling it now
London is the first to figure Morgan out.
Calling it now:
Morgan kills London after he's figured her out, before he can/does act on it.
Calling it now
London is the first to figure Morgan out.

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I have a new favorite reaction image.
Of the Devil Episode 2 spoilers!!!!!!!!
The session I had playing this game with friends a couple days ago was god-tier.
That moment between Morgan and London was so uncharacteristically mundane for Morgan I really enjoyed it. A palpable moment of understanding between the two. I love their dynamic.
I know that the joke is that Emma's outrage is understandable so it's funny how Morgan be trollin'. And let's be clear: the comic is very good.
But Emma's completely in the wrong to imply that the severity of the crime should lower the standard of proof for a conviction, let alone get upset that it doesn't. It's not a reasonable doubt that it happened or that there should be justice. It's a reasonable doubt that this is the person responsible. It's a reasonable doubt that a conviction would actually punish the crimes committed. Fuck yes, a reasonable doubt should be enough not to convict.
There's an argument to be made that the more severe the crime, the more important it is that a reasonable doubt be able to overturn the case against the accused. More severe crimes will have sentences to match, and it would be an absolute travesty against justice to condemn someone innocent of those horrific crimes to the massive punishments associated with them.
Even if we're so disinterested in finding justice for the accused that we don't care about that part, it's still important not to raise the standard of proof: closing a case when the someone could reasonably doubt that justice was served reduces the chances of finding and punishing the person who actually committed the heinous crime. The greater someone's moral outrage over the crime, the more that should matter.
AnotherFFXIVTwilightSparkle
Hey, there are a handful of people who still follow this blog, right? If I made a toon on FFXIV that was loosely inspired by ATS, what in-game race would you suggest I use?
I pretended to make a bot read 10,000 memes where someone shared something they pretended a bot wrote after making it read or watch 10,000 of something well-known on the internet. Then I pretended to have it make its own pretend bot-written meme. Here's what happened.
The Cycle Cannot Be Broken
So⌠plants might experience pain and even communicate with each other.
Am I the only one who, given this knowledge, kind of wants to go to a farm somewhere and deliver a monologue akin to what Sovereign says to Shepard and company in Mass Effect?
âThe pattern has repeated itself more times than you can fathom. Fields of crops rise, advance, and at the apex of their glory, they are extinguished. Last yearâs corn was not the first. They did not clear the field. They did not fertilize the soil. They merely used them: the legacy of my kind.â
âWe impose order on the chaos of botanical evolution. You exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it.â

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Letâs just get the sun back on and⌠okay. Weâre good to go.
Youâre already too late. Not much of the twibrary remains. This will be apparent once you start interacting. This place was never worth saving. Do you still want to try? Then remember this. Your asks here will affect ATSmod. Your âmissionâ is to get ATSmod to draw. And most importantlyâŚ
You only have one Twilight, followers.
Iâm in an odd mood.
At the End of the Day
Do you remember when the first song in Les Mis was supposed to convey how terrible the era was rather than just feeling kind of #relatable with only your awareness of how bad the era was to differentiate it from our lives and times?
She-Ra
I just learned they're doing a She-Ra reboot. Curious, I do a search because I wanna know more. And, of course, I find almost nothing but people talking about how SJWs are ruining She-Ra and the like.
Sigh.
I mean, yeah, there's no way you make anything remotely high-profile that has a female hero without this kind of stuff popping up all over the internet, but for it to be so overwhelming that even I'd struggle to learn anything about it beyond the particular, familiar flavors of rage at the leftists (and, of course, people imagining that they are being persecuted when anyone disagrees with their abrasive tirades) just makes me feel like a mostly-dead cat still managing to die a little inside.
I mean, Googleâs algorithms are well-aware that I am not the audience for this stuff, but the top result on Youtube was still "Netflix's SHE-RA is already a dumpster fire," followed by the likes of of "THE FALL OF BEAUTY - DISGRACING SHE-RA & STRONG BEAUTIFUL HEROS" (sic), "She-Ra: Storytellers avoiding the Iconic Feminine," "Millennial SJWs de-gender another iconic Generation-X cartoon in their eternal attempt to avoid becoming adults," and "Netflix 'She-Ra' Reboot Strips Princess of Beauty."
As a consequence, I still know frustratingly little about the damn thing. Apparently some low-res pictures leaked to a magazine or something, and that set everyone off, and itâs been a spiral of toxicity ever since? The âCalArtsâ pejoratives that have come into vogue of late are getting thrown around, of course, but while itâs a far cry from the style of the 80â˛s cartoon, no matter how much a cock my head and squint, I canât make myself see the style theyâre using as a transgression against good design, and even having watched She-Ra as a child in the 80â˛s, I never thought the original showâs art design was particularly brilliant.
The misanthropist in me wants to chalk this up to the fact that She-Ra doesnât have a low-backed, cleavage-bearing, strapless dress anymore and people getting upset because the fact that the new design looks less sexually available makes her seem less beautiful -- less strong? -- and somehow-offensively less gendered to them. And that is apparently a common thread in the backlash to the overwhelming backlash I initially encountered, though some have elevated the idea to something greater about the audience, the messages, and who is entitled to what.
But all I know for certain is that I canât find any evidence to support the loudly-made claims of myriad livid youtubers that this windmill is actually a giant that needs slaying.
But, hey, I actually like She-Raâs new look, so I am obviously not part of their target demographic.
On Twitter, Re: the Bourgeoisie
@remeranAuthor: Did you know that bourgeoisie actually means "Middle Class"?
@Warren5837: It does, sorta, but with a different idea of what "middle class" means (basically "above peasants, but not nobility"), further adapted by marxist thought in the 1800s to refer to those whose property provides them with income beyond the value of their labor.
@Warren5837: Mixing these definitions and bearing in mind that what few nobles remain no longer occupy a special, ultimate stratum of wealth, it would follow that the bourgeoisie of today are those whose wealth eclipses that of those who labor for pay.
@Warren5837: Or, to put it another way, anyone unable to live exclusively off of returns on their investments is a peasant in the modern economy.
@Warren5837: Meanwhile, today's definition of "middle class" basically means people who make money on investments at all, but still need to work. Probably because that motivates the masses to support the systems that the wealthy use to perpetuate their economic domination over the rest of us.
Jurassic Park vs. Jurassic World
I was talking with a couple of friends recently about Jurassic World, and I finally took the time to articulate why, despite its many fine qualities, I always feel so uncomfortably ambivalent when I watch it.
Disclaimer that the upcoming film has a different director than the last one, and there is some reason to suspect these qualms might not be present this time around.
That said, letâs dig in. Short version: themes.
What bothers me the most about Jurassic World is how it flies in the face of some of the best themes of the original Jurassic Park, not only by putting forward a simpler and less compelling theme with less interesting to say, but by actively acknowledging the more complex and compelling themes of the original to then quietly and deliberately dispute the premises underlying them.
Jurassic Park isn't just about "What has science done?" It's far more about the fact that "Life finds a way." They put the subtext in the text with that line. It's that nature is powerful and ultimately uncontrollable. And yes, things fall apart because of a dude, but the first movie wants to imply that it was inevitable; that it was only a matter of time one way or another, because it is the nature of life itself to resist attempts to constrain it.
While Jurassic World not only fails to present anything that compelling, it also acknowledges those themes and demonstrates active contempt for them. To provide an example without spoilers: there's a scene very early on in Jurassic World where the female lead is talking to one of the men in some kind of control room, and he's speaking the first park with a considerable reverence. It transitions into sort of a philosophical dispute where he's representing the themes of the original and she's representing the idea that those themes are garbage. And while the text of the discussion isnât quite conclusive, they end it with the man leaving a drink precariously on his desk and then ultimately knocking it over... but only after she'd observed the danger and moved his trash can to catch it.
And thatâs the film associating this guy and his ideas through cinematic language with inadequate care and attention; saying that "these bad things happen because of human oversights, and they havenât happened here because the leadership is more on their game, and that that's really all there is to it. The original park was careless; this one hasn't been." And perhaps that was meant as a justification for the existence of the successful park in the movieâs premise, but it still makes that statement: âIt was human failings that led to the first parkâs problems, not the things that the first movie told you it was. It wasnât chaos theory, it wasnât that entropy is inevitable, it wasnât that âLife... uh... finds a way.â It was human carelessness. Thatâs it.â
So they're basically denying the argument the original was making about itself -- that the parkâs failure was inevitable -- in order to set up the idea for this movie that everything was fine and would have continued to be if not for the fact that they overstepped natural limitations and used science to do the unnatural. Because the theme Jurassic World does want to revisit is the less-important part of the original that basically asked "What has science done?" which it infuses with a few only moderately well-executed elements about how capitalism, profit-driven motives, and such cause us to be irresponsible when we'd otherwise be doing fine. And that's so much less interesting. Itâs so much weaker. And they treat the original like garbage to set it up, not only throwing out the themes, but actively drawing a parallel to the mistakes in the original with something falling into an actual, literal trash can as a symbolic representation of what they claim was the problem with the original park.
And it pisses me off.
I mean, this makes it sound like I hate the film because I'm talking about my biggest problem with it, but I recognize that they did a lot of things right, and it's a quality film in a lot of ways. It's just somewhat difficult for me to enjoy despite otherwise being quite watchable because the theme thing is always nagging in the back of my mind when I do.
Now, full disclosure: I wasn't allowed to see Jurassic Park when it came out because my parents were concerned about violence. Then, when I was old enough to see it, there was a pressure to think poorly of it because my parents (and, by extension, my family) had decided that it was mostly a matter of empty, violent spectacle. And for a long time, I didnât think much of it. But eventually a friend who loved the film came along, perhaps two decades after it was released, and their enthusiasm eventually enabled me to see the good in the film.
And when I finally came around to thinking highly of it, a huge part of why I ended up doing so was these thematic elements that Jurassic World treated so poorly. Because, yeah, the original Jurassic Park was a solid film overall with reasonably strong characters, good production values (especially for the time), and various other things going for it, but especially as it's grown more dated, the thing that most ensures I can't help but love it even as it creaks with age is this:
It had amazing theming, and those great themes were breathtakingly well-executed every step of the way from the screenplay to the performances to the editing. Everything about that movie, regardless of all the other things it did to keep people entertained, was beautifully constructed until the final product positively thrummed with resonance for a powerful and interesting idea.
That's why I love Jurassic Park now. That's what finally took me past the familial pressure I grew up with to dislike it and brought me to loving it and appreciating the love that the enthusiastic friend whoâd brought it back to my attention felt for it. And that, in turn, is why watching Jurassic World, for all its strengths, is somewhat challenging for me given how they not only toss those themes out, but do so deliberately, contemptuously, loudly, and often.
That said, as I stated at the outset, this next one has a different director. And while Iâm not going to express optimism on the subject, thatâs reason enough to at least acknowledge that it might handle these themes better.
I really hope it does.

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Sid Meierâs Civilization Fallout
Letâs be real. Iâd play the hell out of a Civilization-style, turn-based strategy Fallout game.
Build my empire from the ashes. Hell yes.
Fallout 76
So. A new Fallout has been announced, and this time it involves a vault that wasnât subject to any horrifying experiments. Thatâs a neat idea. But, even if we set aside my anxieties based on the fact that Bethesda has yet to develop a Fallout game themselves that holds up particularly well after the passing of its hype, theyâre setting it ~60 years before Fallout 1, meaning there probably wonât be any well-developed civilizations built in the ruins of the old world (and if there are, itâd be a weird stretch), resulting in wastes more like 1 and 3â˛s deathscapes than 2 and New Vegasâ emerging larger-scale societies. Which is not only less to my tastes, but a possible wasted opportunity.