#van writes stuff

It's flatly inaccurate to describe Alex Casey as being afraid of dying.

Death, for better or for worse, is an old acquaintance to him, so old that the time to cut them out of his life is long past; an association he's forced to defend as a matter of personal honour; and like a bad friend he feels like he owes one too many favours to, he doesn't have the heart to take a step back, to assert a boundary, to tell the knowledge of the inevitable, I think we're bad for each other.

As much as it is true that Transformers Prime is a gateway drug, Aligned is actually my favourite part of the continuity soup in general, and the biggest reason for it is that all of the stories in it revolve around the same events, told in many tonally and structurally different stories, all containing historical revisions that actually contradict each other in several places and when interacting with it, and no clear One True Canon To Rule Them All. It's an excellent space to play fiction folklorist, trying to piece together yet another version that takes the most compelling elements out of all three.

Part of it is also just the amount of actual war media Aligned contains -- "War for Cybertron", for all its faults, has a really nice dramatic atmosphere, and I genuinely enjoyed the Exodus novel, including the parts that made me want to put it down because it got legit rough from how vivid the mental images it gave me were. In Aligned, the war feels like a tangible thing that happened, that will sometimes bubble to the surface in characters in ways you're not expecting.

And that's one of the reasons I'm so drawn to a civil war narrative for it, especially. Civil war narratives are notoriously prone to historical revisionism, conflicting accounts, and as a fun side effect, it allows me to craft a narrative arc encompassing the entire canon.

(Crossposted from DW)

From a using-language-for-communication perspective, I've always hated memes.

I'm not being hyperbolic; my first exposure to what is now a proper "meme culture" (blech) was just as another form of referential speech, used to build community between those in the know and those -- like me -- who weren't. Memes have always had the same effect as jokes (in that if you don't get the punch line, you're automatically excluded) except they also didn't have structural or vocabulary rules, so there was not even a way to make peace with them and understand that something was a meme from context like the way you can with jokes. They stress me out, and for the longest time I though there was zero legitimate reason to engage in memetic speech.

(And this is where the linguists who follow me are like "that's not how it works", and I feel your pain -- I'd use a better word for this whole fucking nonsense but "meme" is the one internet chose so now we all get to be mad about how that's so imprecise as to be useless.)

Internet memes are the ultimate example of the tendency of people to substitute common ground for real communication, and refusing to clarify whether they're speaking metaphorically or not. It's a nuance I'm not capable of picking up on my own in any instance, and it's also a nuance that is lost between groups. People say laughing brings us together, but what with how specific humour is to a group, jokes aren’t integrative unless you're willing to explain them.

And, like, ngl, it made me feel like a freak even by ND standards, because almost every other ND I know loves the shit out of memery.

I don't get it. On an emotional level, I just don't get it.

However on a practical level, I've come to accept that a) for some people, the ability to signal themselves as a part of a group is important and b) memes are a super easy socially acceptable way to scratch the echolalia itch. Combine that with absurdism coming easily to ND folks whose brains are already wired for pattern-recognition, and it makes sense to me that so many ND love memes.

But I still really fucking hate them. I hate the way anything can be a meme, and that anything can become a meme. I hate the way language gets sloganeered, which makes discussing things harder, especially when it happens to generic concepts. I get so frustrated with peopple who rely on repeating memes and their emotional cache, without seemingly understanding that their reliance on this uncommon "common code" immediately makes them incomprehensible and offputting for people who do not speak in that code. It insulates them from people who don't already think like them, watch all the same media, hang out in the same ever-constricting social circles.

I feel like a lot of wank persists entirely because people keep repeating the language they picked up when they first saw it, creating a memetic association to the topic, and not once think that by changing the language, they change the discussion. Like, my latest rage about people entirely unthinkingly repeating anti rhetoric is a really nice nutshell about why this is a problem. Not to mention, for me someone speaking in meme-laden language is someone who's just sending out powerful signals of "I'm desperate to belong and will do anything to fit in" -- and at this point, I find that a pretty fucking unsafe feature in a person.

I wrote a whole fic’s worth about the geography and geopolitics of Cybertron!

This is meant to be a broad primer for people to start building their own worldbuilding on, and focuses on the information available in the Aligned continuity family pre-RID 2015.

let himself be