I Guess I Don’t Post Sketches

King Ozymandias

rendered in stone with a

strident decree.

Says our dear traveller

(unsentimentally)

"All that remains is his

things fall apart and there’s anarchy everywhere; falcons fly freely and can’t be compelled.

Dimming the tide there is blood in the water and everywhere customs of innocence drowned.

Held by the worst is a fervent intensity; lacking conviction the best run aground.

Surely there must be some kind of apocalypse; surely epiphany must be at hand!

Visions unbidden from Spiritus Mundi of something awakening out on the sand:

Head of a man with a leonine frame and a pitiless gaze that’s as blank as the sun;

sleep became nightmare by passage of centuries long before eons of slumber were done.

Higgledy piggledy, beast of antiquity, imminent, just as the prophecies warn,

Gwi-ma, as the interior voice of shame, can only voice the shame that already exists within someone. During times of emotional crisis (ie Mira and Zoey) or when someone has done something that they ought to be ashamed of (say, ommitting certain facts about an event leading to them gaining a benefit they might not otherwise have), his voice gets much louder.

And it isn't your fault, if he controls you. You didn't have a choice.

And if you didn't have a choice, then what do you have to be ashamed of?

So while it may be a comforting lie for Jinu to tell himself that Gwi-Ma controls people, it's probably more accurate for Gwi-Ma to be talking to them, suggesting courses of action or giving justifications for giving in to your worst, most selfish, shameful impulses.

And when you do give in, the shame from that moment will haunt you forever. You could have chosen differently, after all, but you were weak and selfish, and you deserve everything that happened to you.

Uber is a fucking shell game of a company designed to leech investor capital and output bootleg cabs.

Nvidia posted a profit in 2023 of $4.37 billion. This is like someone stealing less than a penny from me.

And they lock this kid in a prison hospital for LIFE?

For a pretty good explanation by someone with a degree in psychology and a practical background in reporting video game news, see episode 249 of the Castle Super Beast podcast; it’s on YouTube here and the timestamp for the relevant segment is roughly 1:46:42. In summary, though:

The person in question was a member of a hacker group who hack companies and put things like the personal data of those companies’ employees up for ransom. He also has a history of stalking women. He is also severely autistic, to the point where the court found he was not mentally capable of standing trial because he could not understand how his actions constituted criminality and when asked whether he would continue to engage in this sort of behavior if released, he said he would. As such, he was handed over to the mental health system, which does not have fixed sentence lengths, where he’ll be kept in treatment until doctors are convinced he’s no longer in danger of continuing his criminal activities if released. However, once in the mental health system, he began having violent outbursts, so instead of being sent to a mental institution he was sent to the hospital wing of a prison. Prisons have significantly poorer treatment records than mental institutions, so it is statistically unlikely he’ll receive the treatment he needs to be found no longer a danger to society as long as he’s in a hospital prison; he won’t be sent to a mental health institution until he’s judged to no longer be a danger to staff; and because he was shunted into the mental health system instead of being given a criminal sentence, he won’t be released until he’s been judged to have undergone the successful treatment he’s statistically unlikely to receive.

It is an awful catch-22 and an indictment of both the legal and the mental health systems, but it isn’t Rockstsr being evil. I say this as someone who does not like or play Rockstar games.

by the way, just so everyone knows what not to do, shift+r reblogs a post instantly

This is how it's going so far:

Magic and the supernatural as depicted in the movie doesn't exist. Huntrix is still a highly successful and popular kpop group, but are otherwise normal people. Instead of demon patterns, Rumi has vitiligo and her shame stems from that. The Saja Boys still compete with Huntrix for the Idol Awards, but are later disqualified due to foul play by sabotaging the girl's Golden performance via exposing Rumi's vitiligo with Mira snd Zoey lookalikes, as well as having no license for their street performance of Soda Pop. Instead of actively hunting the Saja Boys, the girls simply join them whenever they make public appearances to remain relevant and the Saja Boys do the same up until the aforementioned Idol Awards.

I feel like Completely Normal Low Conflict Non-Magical KPDH AU might have trouble interfacing with the more Serious Business War Story versions of Transformers, but if you want to pull back from there into the less grim takes on the property, the Decepticons scheming to take over the Kpop industry so they can divert its profits to buy fuel would fit with a lot of Megatron's behavior in many versions of Transformers, and the traditional way to introduce a set of civilian characters to the Autobots is "I found this busted car and am fixing it up; wait, it's an alien robot?" So, Decepticons are active in South Korea trying to infiltrate the Kpop industry (Soundwave is taking point I guess?), Autobots are also there investigating, one of the Autobots loses a fight and gets injured and discovered by Huntrix, one of whom in this version of things is a car / motorcycle aficionado -- I'm guessing Mira, since Rumi has plants and Zoey has sea life but Mira doesn't really have a Thing -- and in the process of fixing the injured Autobot up, Huntrix discovers that the Autobot is an Autobot while the Autobot discovers that she or he has accidentally fallen into the laps of the perfect group of industry contacts to help her or his investigation into Megatron's latest evil plan. Traditionally this would be either Arcee (motorcycle version) or Bumblebee (any version), I think.

On the other hand, if you want to go full on everybody's having a bad time, you could take your low-conflict Huntrix AU and toss it into the deep end of one of the grimmer, more realpolitik Transformers continuities.

As your preferred take on KPDH is relatively low-stakes and absent violence, you may wish to consider a Rescue Bots inspired Transformers variant — Rescue Bots is a Transformers continuity where the Decepticons aren’t present and the cast consists of Autobots who’ve been assigned to Earth to act as search and rescue volunteers, because it could be handy to have giant robots to help with that (and because there’s no shortage of rescue vehicles they can transform into that Hasbro can sell toys of). There was a cartoon (that I haven’t watched) in which this was framed as “The Autobot/Decepticon war is happening off-camera, and these are inexperienced Autobots that Optimus Prime doesn’t want fighting in it” but I believe there was another Rescue Bots continuity (based on comics that came with toys? I could be misremembering or confabulating this, admittedly) where the Decepticons just don’t come up at all and it’s implied that Autobots just… send missions to various planets throughout the galaxy to help out, like if Omni-Man’s cover story in Invincible were real. Rescue Bots variants tend to be more kid-pitched, but actual search and rescue work is serious life and death business, so if you want stakes but not fights this is a viable option for how to handle cybertronians in a low-violence setting at pretty much any maturity tone. You could even bring in known Decepticon characters and just have them be, like, around as rescue operatives who are kind of jerks about it, if you really to include Starscream being his recognizable self in a setting without a war. (And what fic wouldn’t be improved with the addition of Starscream, really?)

This is how it's going so far:

Magic and the supernatural as depicted in the movie doesn't exist. Huntrix is still a highly successful and popular kpop group, but are otherwise normal people. Instead of demon patterns, Rumi has vitiligo and her shame stems from that. The Saja Boys still compete with Huntrix for the Idol Awards, but are later disqualified due to foul play by sabotaging the girl's Golden performance via exposing Rumi's vitiligo with Mira snd Zoey lookalikes, as well as having no license for their street performance of Soda Pop. Instead of actively hunting the Saja Boys, the girls simply join them whenever they make public appearances to remain relevant and the Saja Boys do the same up until the aforementioned Idol Awards.

I feel like Completely Normal Low Conflict Non-Magical KPDH AU might have trouble interfacing with the more Serious Business War Story versions of Transformers, but if you want to pull back from there into the less grim takes on the property, the Decepticons scheming to take over the Kpop industry so they can divert its profits to buy fuel would fit with a lot of Megatron's behavior in many versions of Transformers, and the traditional way to introduce a set of civilian characters to the Autobots is "I found this busted car and am fixing it up; wait, it's an alien robot?" So, Decepticons are active in South Korea trying to infiltrate the Kpop industry (Soundwave is taking point I guess?), Autobots are also there investigating, one of the Autobots loses a fight and gets injured and discovered by Huntrix, one of whom in this version of things is a car / motorcycle aficionado -- I'm guessing Mira, since Rumi has plants and Zoey has sea life but Mira doesn't really have a Thing -- and in the process of fixing the injured Autobot up, Huntrix discovers that the Autobot is an Autobot while the Autobot discovers that she or he has accidentally fallen into the laps of the perfect group of industry contacts to help her or his investigation into Megatron's latest evil plan. Traditionally this would be either Arcee (motorcycle version) or Bumblebee (any version), I think.

On the other hand, if you want to go full on everybody's having a bad time, you could take your low-conflict Huntrix AU and toss it into the deep end of one of the grimmer, more realpolitik Transformers continuities.

This is how it's going so far:

Magic and the supernatural as depicted in the movie doesn't exist. Huntrix is still a highly successful and popular kpop group, but are otherwise normal people. Instead of demon patterns, Rumi has vitiligo and her shame stems from that. The Saja Boys still compete with Huntrix for the Idol Awards, but are later disqualified due to foul play by sabotaging the girl's Golden performance via exposing Rumi's vitiligo with Mira snd Zoey lookalikes, as well as having no license for their street performance of Soda Pop. Instead of actively hunting the Saja Boys, the girls simply join them whenever they make public appearances to remain relevant and the Saja Boys do the same up until the aforementioned Idol Awards.

I feel like Completely Normal Low Conflict Non-Magical KPDH AU might have trouble interfacing with the more Serious Business War Story versions of Transformers, but if you want to pull back from there into the less grim takes on the property, the Decepticons scheming to take over the Kpop industry so they can divert its profits to buy fuel would fit with a lot of Megatron's behavior in many versions of Transformers, and the traditional way to introduce a set of civilian characters to the Autobots is "I found this busted car and am fixing it up; wait, it's an alien robot?" So, Decepticons are active in South Korea trying to infiltrate the Kpop industry (Soundwave is taking point I guess?), Autobots are also there investigating, one of the Autobots loses a fight and gets injured and discovered by Huntrix, one of whom in this version of things is a car / motorcycle aficionado -- I'm guessing Mira, since Rumi has plants and Zoey has sea life but Mira doesn't really have a Thing -- and in the process of fixing the injured Autobot up, Huntrix discovers that the Autobot is an Autobot while the Autobot discovers that she or he has accidentally fallen into the laps of the perfect group of industry contacts to help her or his investigation into Megatron's latest evil plan. Traditionally this would be either Arcee (motorcycle version) or Bumblebee (any version), I think.

On the other hand, if you want to go full on everybody's having a bad time, you could take your low-conflict Huntrix AU and toss it into the deep end of one of the grimmer, more realpolitik Transformers continuities.

In the first panel, SG sees TG playing on the computer and is disappointed. SG puts a lot of value in the idea of “making things,” specifically “art,” and thinks TG is just wasting their time

So he asks them if they wouldn’t rather be “making something” instead of just playing games and listening to music, implying that TG isn’t doing anything worthwhile or creative with their time

But TG replies that “interpreting is generative,” meaning that even if they spend their time just doing fun stuff, the mere act of enjoying something is creating an experience and an interpretation. Talking about something, dancing to music or sharing a piece of art with your friends IS “making something,” and each of those can be worthwhile and artistic.

SG leaves, complaining he “can’t be an auteur of [interpretation].” Auteur is a movie term that refers to a filmmaker with artistic control and vision enough to be considered essentially the singular creator of the resulting work of art. Turns out, SG doesn’t just want to “make things,” he wants to make things he and others see as “important.” He wants to make art not for the sake of art, but for the sake of being recognized and praised for his art.

This comic really speaks to elitism within the artistic community, the idea that art needs to meet certain standards to be considered art. SG’s viewpoint is really traditionalist, that art need to be “approved” and validated in order to be considered “really art;” while TG recognizes that art can be as little as just talking about what you love.