dilly, dilly

thinking abt how you can train somebody to have phantom sense. depending on the person & the environment it's not even that hard. a little controlled specific direction to do to your real body what is happening to your virtual/prosthetic body and then you taper off and suddenly your brain is registering it all as just you.

imo etho regards his own clones as objects/empty vessels mainly & sadly just wouldn't think abt fucking his own clone. however adventures with npc stuff in his modded series suggest a) he thinks it's funny to have copies of his friends around like bdubs in the most recent season and b) willing to program a pseudo gf whatever in the first one. therefore, i think he'd be willing to fuck other people's clones. bc they're objects but interesting ones. run a simulation fine tune the scene. play it back. see how real you can make it. etc.

like i'll concede maybe he fucked around with one in the context of testing shells for future pseudo-hardcore worlds or something in the name of testing body functions but it was more work & less interesting than regular masturbation so whatever. doesn't much think about it. until he's messing with copies of other people and he remembers they can get off and do certain simple actions in loops or whatever. he'd know he should probably feel a little more gross about setting up scenes like that, silent character wearing bdubs' face or whomever, but he really doesn't at all. it's just not that different than a fantasy as long as it stays private. they're like dolls, more than anything, and the differences are obvious most of the time, but when the mental catalogue of little details from fantasies align just right with the knockoff physical forms, well, it's good. who could blame him.

a little more specifically i think he thinks making copies of his friends for modded worlds is just funny, and making a chatbot gf is also kind of funny but the tech for a long time in these unstable worlds aren't good enough to have both sentience and animation in a single body, it's supercomputer or fancy mannequin. those other ethos in the lab with the dreamworld portals weren't him, they're more like mindless beasts. so when he gets back around to the most recent modded series and the dolls are a lot more animated; you still have to script them, of course, and it's a lot like jacklin, but the bdubs he summons to staff his restaurant breathes, that long moss coat swaying as it waits for an input. the voice is all wrong, but there's a moment when it flashes that wide, wide smile at him as it hands over a drink during testing and etho flushes. it's justifiable to keep tinkering, both a test of skill to see how good he can get and how well he knows bdubs, if a little bit of code and a little bit of magic can bring this version of him to life, if he can make it close enough. when he's back on hermitcraft it's so easy to give into the temptation of quizzing bdubs - the real one, the original - so etho can break him down and build him back up from first principles. bdubs starts questioning the questioning but he's easy to placate: etho's just curious. he wonders. bdubs is so private - and there's an argument opening bdubs can't resist, and the trouble is dodged. maybe it's embarrassing, if anyone were ever to know, but he's always been willing to tolerate a lot of cringe to run a simulation like this, so if this bartending bdubs is a little out of character, a little too obliging and lingers too long when handing off the drinks, if etho takes a little advantage, if maybe he picks fantasies that can't be real anywhere else to test how good the simulation is well. nobody'll ever know.

my ideal number of followers is i think about 2 dozen so i'm giving up and softblocking people on main en masse. easiest block is for the crime of being 19 i am literally too old & tired to tolerate it anymore.

oh my god is there an unblock limit. i think there's a limit on how many people per ? unit of time you can unblock. 😬 oops and sorry to the like 10 people i have to wait to sb!

ive got something crazy in my braims brewing on this but in bdubs' ltd life supercut when he's doing the extended stair-building bit with etho there's a part where they're discussing doing things in creative mode. and etho's doing his not very subtle bts probing, how many times do you redo things in creative. and bdubs says oh hundreds. and the convo keeps flowing as they finish and bdubs says it changes how you work though you spend all that time in creative. alone. and he's stopped on the flat part just facing etho directly in that way he also does on streams when he's clearly parked his cubito somewhere so still his hands must not be on the mouse or whatever. and the way he says that is haunting me so bad bc like realistically etho also builds in survival alone. but. the virtual-physical separation of being offworld. the way etho'd been picking at bdubs' seams abt it right before. it makes me want to throw up

and to be clear i think the musician's extremely obvious desire to psychosexually and homo/erotically murder his audience via textual and metatexual proxies, such that the audience is both the character in the song and, paradoxically, the song itself as given life by the act of being listened to and contextualized by that audience, is the hottest thing abt his work. and yet i do think he should die for it.

okay okay okay even if these "characters" in his songs are not proxies for the audience, you cannot listen to the now here's my plan version of i see a darkness and the original or even! even the johnny cash cover of it! and tell me that it is not meant to be cruel. it is genuinely genuinely cruel! taking your extremely beloved ballad about homosocial repression in the face of suicidal ideation and turning it into a cowboy disco romp is so genuinely hateful on a scale i'm not sure has ever been matched by another artist.