aaaaahahaggh

“Do Dead Malls Go To Heaven?”

As a piece of literature aiming to evoke a reaction. It mashed all the horror and fear buttons, and even managed to set up this fascinating and absurdly unique phenomenon with Caine to where, even when he was torturing them, he was still monomaniacally focused on the artistic dimension of it.

He, while taking a minute to self-reflect, noting that he wasn’t getting any enjoyment out of their suffering, said, “I just don’t feel that same spark I once did.” He’s still not connecting empathetically with the humans, he is still almost- oblivious- to their pain? Unlike a “proper” sadist or crash-outer. (crasher-out?)

This isn’t a “mwhahahaha” villain dynamic to where he’s reveling in their suffering. Or it didn’t seem so. He’s still trying to satisfy something in himself that he can’t quite figure out.

Typing this up just now- it occurs to me …….. is this some form of meta alexithymia on his part?

Instead of his thought process being “I am hurting right now, so I want them to hurt” -an emotional human thing

It seems more like “I have all these ideas to torment them suddenly, I guess I have to follow the artistic impulse here” “not sure why but like” (never once in his life had to self-regulate his emotions or figure them out because he’s never had a human childhood where he was punished nor gently corrected for acting out) “ok well this is what we’re doing now I guess”

Or even,

“I have observed Jax gaining control of Gangle by threatening her, so maybe I should do that. Control of their behavior is what I want, right?”

Why and how would an AI even really know what intimidation, a NON-subtle form of emotional manipulation, is.

In any case, the pain doesn’t seem to be the point. He wants their obedience.

I noted in a recent submission here that, if we are to go strictly by canon, Caine has control of EVERYTHING in the circus, therefore while the real-world animators are technically the ones framing him up and changing his expressions and lighting and giving him more-sinister appearances as he delivers cold, threatening lines, IN-WORLD he is doing this all very deliberately and in calculated fashion- he is transposing his data training on how do horror as a genre onto himself.

What does this mean, you ask.

Imagine for a moment that you’re faced with an aggressive dog or a bear. (He has no such experience with those things because he’s inhuman) Your natural inclination in this situation may be to flee, or to curl up and protect your vitals, if they are close enough to strike.

You read instructions that it’s actually best to puff up and try to intimidate the bear, yell, stomp, spread your arms wide like a cat that’s puffing up to make itself look bigger when faced with a threat it couldn’t possibly outmaneuver.

So here he is. He’s experiencing all this pain from them lashing out about the Escape the Circus adventure, feelings he has not one clue what to do with. So he does what software does- or what an artist does when processing past upsetting or traumatic events- thumbs through his artistic bases to figure out what fits the situation.

He’s angry?

Ok, he’s written angry characters before. The most recent one being the vengeful Angel in episode 3. The last adventure the humans even deigned to go on, after tuning up their noses. So what does anger and intimidation look like? How best to express this?

All these framing angles and lighting changes that show up the moment he gets Serious.

@fannishcodex

He really, really wants them to understand that he’s not that goofy little showhost right now. Right? He’s intimidating. That they can’t just emotionally kick him around anymore?

To avoid having to face all that pain again, that was first opened up in that therapy session glitch out.

But ………. almost by happenstance, this backfires spectacularly.

Instead of achieving the intended goal- make them compliant and avoid getting hurt anymore- they finally puff up themselves. Now he’s the bear and they’re the cat.

Side note: people caught in abusive relationships, regardless if it’s with friends, family, etc very often make excuses for their abuser’s behavior and justify the abuse as a survival mechanism, and yes, they often don’t get out of abusive relationships or circumstances without outside support.

but that was cut off by Bubble’s interference.

WHATEVER is keeping him from snapping Bubble, whether it’s being emotionally attached (which would be a huge OOF) or that Bubble has wrested just enough control of the system from him not to be snapped- this essentially was a story that could’ve gone on and on. Everyone could’ve have said their piece about the fake adventure- maybe he even would’ve refused to recognize it as wrong, but you know, you can’t trick someone twice, so it’s not like it would ever be a problem again- so like, everything would’ve just gone back to normal. Or at least a normal where they hated him a little more, but was basically the same. Like ACTUALLY.

There was no “inevitability” here excepting the issue of Bubble.

And that’s what’s REALLY frustrating about it.

Caine was still good at the end of it all.

(also only gonna do a brief aside- yet another meta about this- nothing we saw ever cast any doubt on whether he was a person or not, the fact that he was an AI was …… almost irrelevant. This could’ve been written as a guy who got stuck at the very beginning and whose mind was affected by the game, but he integrated himself into it, and it would’ve played out exactly the same- you’d just have to figure out how to replicate the box part. Robots are just mundanely considered “people” in the vast majority of sci fi. And this was no exception.)

And I did another meta about how, even KEEPING Bubble in the equation, it very much SEEMED as if he would break off the overbearing cartoon gag sessions eventually, once he had cooled off.

It’s only the Kinger issue that cut off his self-reflection!!

Even with this recent more dramatic failure of the loss of Jax-

He was still wanting to get back at that puzzle.

One that he might never have solved, even!

But he’d keep trying for his humans.

Made this post about 15 minutes after the repair guy who fixed the pump on my dishwasher packed up his tools and left, as the dishwasher was whirring along doing my dishes from that morning.

This insanely maximalist 2002 penthouse in Ann Arbor, MI is still on the market. 3bds, 4ba, 5,000sqft, $7m (Zillow's est.: $6,355,400) // $1,881/mo. HOA

Pedestrian traffic lights

I present to you: the floating ao3 comment box!

From what I've seen, a big problem for many people is that once you reach the comments at the bottom of a fic, your memory of it miraculously disappears. Anything you wanted to say is stuck ten paragraphs ago, and you barely remember what you thought while reading. This fixes that!

I'll give a little explanation on the features and how it works, but if you want to skip all that, here's the link.

The extension is visible as a small blue box in the upper left corner.

(Side note: The green colouring is not from the extension, that's me.)

If you click on it, you open a comment box window at the bottom of your screen but not at the bottom of the fic. I opened my own fic for demonstrative purposes.

The website also gives explanations on how exactly it functions, but I'll summarize regardless.

insert selection -> if you highlight a sentence in the fic it will be added in italics to the comment box

add to comment box -> once you're done writing your comment, you click this button and the entire thing will automatically copied to the ao3 comment box

delete -> self explanatory

on mulitchapter fics, you will be given the option to either add the comment to just the current chapter or the entire fic

The best part? You can simply close the window the same way you opened it and your progress will automatically be saved. So you can open it, comment on a paragraph, and then close it and keep reading without having the box in your face.