juzi crumbs in the oven

• maybe

Anonymous asked:

Just a crumb of juzi

if you cant afford therapy try getting a god run in binding of isaac. works for me

the brainworms are starving and cannibalizing each other now. torn between working any one of several murder drones projects or one of multiple original projects. this shit is agonizing man what the fuck do i do

the existence of praying mantis people is one of the things in black nerve where it’s really difficult to appreciate how weird it is

there are a lot of sapient bugs in the heartlands: two kinds of ant, a wasp, a bee, a termite (unfortunately extinct, RIP), an ambrosia beetle, a roach, a spider specially inspired and named after Anelosimus eximius (rather than the much more popular jumping spiders, who are simple pets in the heartlands), and of course a species of moth.

one of these things is not like the other. every single intelligent bug in the heartlands is based on a species that’s either eusocial, or notably social/gregarious (hissing roaches, social spiders, ambrosia beetles)

the exception is the moths, who are just silkmoths‍ ‍‍—‍ except it’s established that the reason moths are sapient at all is due a species‍-​wide curse[Moths, Gifts, Curses]

in other words, for every species in the heartlands, there’s a good explanation for why they they would evolve or otherwise be saddled with intelligence.

but mantes are solitary predators.

…the irony is, because every heartlands story is about mantids to the near‍-​exclusion of everything else, every reader understandably just ends up taking the intelligence of mantes as a part of the premise rather than something to be interrogated. alas.

sometimes one of your WIPs latches onto a song and it’s shit man, this whole album’s haunted. cant listen to any of it unless you want thoughts about it to sprout like mushrooms after the rain

it’s bug horror time

feels like it’s been a good minute since i cooked up some proper lore. today i tried to explain how the shadow clone bloodlimit clan works, but in classic moon‍-​aiming stars‍-​as‍-​consolation‍-​prize fashion, i realized i first needed to write a few thousands words explaining how the praying mantis people have innate psychic powers but lost them

A Mind Like a Massacre

twisalis walked so juzi could run

there’s actually a huge difference between a good fic and a mid fic with enough pieces to let you imagine a fic that would be great. few appreciate this

entitiy‍-​4 asked:

Here’s (maybe) a fun one for the ship game: J/doll

the funny thing about this one is that i actually have a the start of an plot outline for a jolly fic sitting in my tumblr drafts but i forgor

mainly ship it on account of the artists who draw cute pics of it, but it’s also pretty convenient that it’s very plausible for J and Doll to have room to have gotten along in the canon timeline. (my jolly plot, written before e7, mainly grappled with the angst of Doll catching feelings for J when J’s devoted to Tessa‍ ‍‍—‍ now, with the reveal that J knew Tessa was dead, it’s even more plausible!)

i think it’s funny to imagine J and Doll both seething over their respective defeats by Uzi, or that Doll’s Dollness might make J the impulsive, emotional one in their relationship.

hard to have an unpopular opinion when i’m not sure if there’s enough jolly shippers for there to be a popular opinion

entitiy‍-​4 asked:

Thoughts on Thad/N?

i respect the bromance. one of my unwritten juzi premises changes the way pilot plays out so that N raids Outpost‍-​3 with V‍ ‍‍—‍ and here, Thad’s the one who convinces N side with the works. i think he could do it. he’s got both determination and wants to have a good time and i think N would vibe with both

vision’s pretty foggy if i’m being honest because i feel like a chinese room whenever i’m writing or talking about N

entitiy‍-​4 asked:

Thoughts on Khan/Nori?

1. i ship it in the sense that i care about resembling canon. that one pair of pics by @confettiiz is the closest i’ve come to seeing a vision of the ship i care for.https://www.tumblr.com/confettiiz/756305215595102208
2. what i like about the ship is nori.
3. i might have unpopular opinions, but for me the essence of a hot take is having some insight or humor to offer. ‘im not a fan of popular thing’ is not worth the breath it takes

tired: finishing the current arc of HT so i can return to writing juzi
wired: rewriting old sections of HT to add more juzi retroactively

lord tell me i didnt spend this evening write a thousand and a half entirely unnecessary words of a new scene for old HT

• only tomorrow will tell
• but it’s not looking good chat

iveraines asked:

i am asking about your ocs give me a yap about one of your favorites >:3

you asked this in the middle of me trying to edit HT so i hope you know what you’ve done >.>

so um. my favorite is probably Mewla Asetari but i don’t think the world is ready for the Mewla yap yet

“squiggleyapper, tell me about your favorite oc”
“you couldn’t handle my favorite oc, mutual. my favorite oc is fit for book, let alone a blogpost. you better go to a yapper who cooks normaler characters”^note[Potion Seller]

taunting aside, the problem with mewla is that she’s such a damn complex girlboss queenfailure. to understand her, you need to know about the noble clan of asetari (importantly, her mother uvema, and to understand her you need to cover the second grand trial at least) as well as how their bloodline abilities works (which has at least three separate mechanics), and you need to understand the deal with the unbrood black ops, and as well as the context of the third grand trial

and even that’s skipping over all the background needed to understand black nerve in the first place, which at this point is an intimidatingly complex setting to get into. and if you think any of that sounds interesting, i haven’t even mentioned how her husband was a failed prophet or how she split in two then repeatedly cheated death to master the impossible art of intangibility, or the mundane stuff like her anti‍-​fascist terrorism arc

…honestly, maybe it’s me who’s not ready to write about mewla :s

instead, i think i’ll try someone simpler first. (this is not me tempting fate, do not curl O monkey’s paw). Vexed Nobility and Salvation by Fire

gimme the storytelling mistakes TO SEEK LIKE A MOTH TO A FLAME when writing

oatsugardonut asked:

I have a question, how do you structure your stories? like Hostile Takeover for example. What is your technique on plotting?

entitiy‍-​4 asked:

I do wanna ask: thoughts on eldritchterrors (j x Cyn)?

i dont vibe with it at all

admittedly these days i’m pretty grouchy about any other ship that involves j and uzi, but i find in my head, j and cyn have no chemistry. you can contrast this with cynzi, or of course juzi, and the difference is while both of those ships can be toxic, they’re toxic within overlapping value systems‍ ‍‍—‍ there’s a potential for rivalry, respect, begruding appreciation.

in either of those other ships, the two of them are similar enough to get under each other’s skin. an uncanny valley of just different enough that they can’t stand it. but with j and cyn, they’re different flat out. they don’t challenge each other’s value systems; they fit right in as the very thing the other despises and strives not to be

as per my previous advocacy of juzicyn, this does suggest that uzi could be the glue that makes makes the relationship work. not just because they’d be forced into proximity, but because if they share an fascination with uzi, then they finally share something and now chemistry is on the table

but actually, i lied. i can see an angle for chemistry between them even without bringing uzi into the question‍ ‍‍—‍ there was a j/cyn oneshot i liked that proposed that the two of them could bond over a shared love of art.

as for unpopular opinions, this time i think i actually have one and it’s definitely not going over well with my followers

cynessa/j is the worst of j/cyn and jessa combined. all of the lack of chemistry of j/cyn, all of the power dynamics and relationship imbalance of jessa (but unambiguously bad, now!). the only advantage it has over j/cyn is there’s actual reason for it to happen and the advantage it has over jessa is that it involves an interesting character

the fixation so many people have with cynessa angst is something i do not get, and it’s the first time i’ve ever understood the impulse other people have to tell people to stop having fun?

Anonymous asked:

What is your read on what the Solver is and to what extent it and Cyn are separate identities? I’ve found that this is something people tend to have strong opinions about.

i think it’s a bit silly to have strong opinions about something with no more than glancing implication one way or the other in canon.

the text on Cyn’s screen at the beginning of episode 5 strongly hints at her making a deal with something to gain her powers. i think it’s simple extrapolation that solver powers have a source‍ ‍‍—‍ metaphysical, alien, a rogue superintelligence, universe sim console commands‍ ‍‍—‍ and it grants powers for a reason. likely resource collection, expansion and assimilation.

i dont think there’s a compelling reason to assume more than that.

i think you can tell an interesting story where Cyn is a manipulator who was putting on an act from the beginning until she was in a position to discard the mask (if you’ve seen my analysis of the series, i think this is the most thematically consonant reading)

i think you can tell an interesting story where Cyn is locked away and forced to watch as her body is used to commit atrocities. i’ve seen one reading where Cyn cedes control to the solver when she talks back to Lousia; everything before that was Cyn, everything after Solver. i’ve seen one fic where there’s an intermediate identity, the original Cyn locked away and forced to watch herself be controlled by someone crueler, and this is still separate from the inhumanity of the undiluted Solver

something i don’t think i’ve seen enough people discuss is how material collection (see: Eldritch J) and possession (Nori, Uzi) fits into this picture. which one are they? treating “one Cyn or Cyn+Solver” as a dichotomy is a lack of imagination. there’s enough dots here that you can draw any number of pictures between them

in short, the canonical answer is: it doesn’t matter, and “Cyn’s all there is” is the simple application of Occam’s Razor. the fanfic answer is: whatever makes for a more interesting story. what answer i go for depends on what the plot demands

ok man the HT rework is turning into a whole Thing

i might need someone to tell me if i’m getting lost in the sauce

everyone always praises that one mutual that gives you a dozen likes and reblogs whenever they wake up, but unsung is the mutual who mostly watches quietly and only ever interacts once every few days, if that

like hell yeah i got the legendary drop

not me about to write uzi making j swoon with khan‍-​tier rizz

hit her with the “shall i compare thee to a rocket equation” pick up

send the assassins after me i’ve been goofing off on discord instead of doing the last proofreading pass on the oneshot

it’s gonna feel really weird if post late at night (and i’m lowkey worried less ao3 people will see it at this hour), but i also wanna share this already lol

also when i took a break for fresh air after finishing the draft, i was blasted with random inspiration for a pre‍-​cabin fever labs fic. so if anyone wants to hear about that i have a pitch ready to go

Witchhunter, Heretic, Holy Reckoner!

entitiy‍-​4 asked:

You know I just realized Tines of the Devil’s Fork and The Headhunter and Her Stubborn Game make a lot of sense (or at least don’t actively conflict) in the same continuity. Was this planned? Or just a happy accident? Avatar

the resonance did occur to me as i wrote Headhunter. main reason i didn’t make the connection explicit is, well, it feels a bit tonally dubious to put stark serious prose poetry in direct continuity with pure indulgent lezzing out.

i also think if i was going to confirm the connection, it feels like a missed opportunity not to allude to any of the electromagnetic horror that was the whole undercurrent of Tines

now, it probably won’t shock you to learn that when i started drafting Tines, i was in fact setting up a confrontation with J; the pacing just didnt work out and i had to adapt

gratifying to know that someone caught that tho <3

i woke up feeling pretty down today, but had the inexplicable urge to put on my (technically unreleased) electronic album to listen to

and it filled me with determination? the sheer feeling of “wait a minute… i’m awesome actually” gave me the motivation to do something i’d be putting off and procrastinating for one month shy of a year now

so yeah. my fourth album is finally officially available on my bandcamp!

https://inneraporia.bandcamp.com/album/prefigurations

please listen to it. if you don’t have the time to sit down with an hour long album, here are some highlight tracks:

1. A Well‍-​Kept Garden
2. Sublime Pixelated Apparition
3. The Myth of New Beginnings
4. Scholars of Unknown Slumber

tumblr reblogging really has a secret of the stairway ass effect where you dont figure out what to tag a reblog until after you hit send

watching a video about ferrofluids and by god that one pydrasplatling image has ruined me. do they still have free covid tests

• if i’m being real i didnt get it at first
• thought it was just random technobabble
• but now that i’m reminded what ferrofluids look like
• oh i see the vision
• >.<

pydrasplatling asked:

I would kill for you to write something about Alice /nf

She just fascinates me and I’m so fucking sad she was introduced just for her to go splat Avatar

idk if you’ve seen the pitch i wrote for a Nori vs Alice centric fic a few days ago. i don’t want to give people the impression that i’m going to write that fic, but i figure it may be of interest as a look as to how i might approach something close.

problem with writing alice is she only shows up in parts of the world and timeline that are far from what i have experience writing, so the conceptual work it would take to execute cabin fever labs to my standards is pretty disqualifying unfortunately

and that’s on top of the thinking required to get a handle on her and the characters around her. it’d be good practice, so i do have an intellectual interest in giving it a shot, but it’s tough competition in my head these days

actually wait, i’m wrong‍ ‍‍—‍ alice makes several appearances in corrupt combustion already and plays a pivotal role there. so i guess if more alice writing is going to happen, it’s going to happen there

• she also technically gets a few lines in like shadows chasing the balance
• bit of an L tho tbh because she really deserves more of a spotlight there

entitiy‍-​4 replied:

perfect vessel nori???

oh i guess i never did talk about These Dying Star‍-​Lit Streets in public did i?

it’s another fic idea that only exists in pitch form now, one of the things i was mildly obsessed with back when episode eight just dropped

pitch is a bit longer now, though

These Dying Star-Lit Streets

that’s the background setup but none of that helps you understand the perfect vessel comment. that’s something that occurred to me during a discord convo. i’ll quote it under the cut

…ok so like
the whole thematic point of These Dying Star‍-​Lit Streets is that there’s no villain or great evil making the world suck
but i just got hit with the image of Nori consuming Cyn’s core when she defeats her
and just taking her place as the host of the solver
on some hollow knight type shit
chained up beneath outpost‍-​3 or back in cabin fever or something

hm, one way to have an eaten cake is to put emphasis on that last bit
hollow knight type shit‍ ‍‍—‍ nori isn’t the mastermind orchestrating anything, she’s keeping things contained as best she can
still leaks through and she’s faltering, but the bad stuff that comes arises not from any intent, but the lack of it

actually omg
i might genuinely have to go through with this angle
bc one of the biggest open questions is “how tf did uzi slip through the cracks and become an orphan in this au? does no one know who her parents are?”
but what if that was intentional‍ ‍‍—‍ specifically because if uzi was known to be nori’s daughter, she would have been expected and groomed to sacrifice herself just like her mother as soon as nori failed and they needed a new containing vessel
so whoever did this for uzi wanted her to have a life of her own, even if it kinda sucked
question is who. immediate thought is nori herself, but a more interesting option is someone (like yeva) doing this in spite of nori being in favor or ambivalent with what uzi’d be expected to become
(maybe nori thought it was ridiculous to think she’d ever fail or need backup)

…weird thought though
what if yeva did this‍ ‍‍—‍ and the C9PD figured it out and hunted her down to interrogate her on the whereabouts of the savior’s daughter
but even with a knife to her throat, yeva remains steadfast
and this is how V ends up killing doll’s parents

when someone twenty years ago says “i hate my wife”, it’s cringe boomer humor, but when some chick says it these days it’s toxic yuri and cool? okay…

J has ruined me. Any time I read about a female character as wearing business suits or business casual I’m like 👀 even when I didn’t like her before

A powerful weapon against our class consciousness…

• yes this is about the new chapter of claw

kneels in meditation for one hour before opening eyes of secular light

Taylor Hebert/Sophia Hess has the juzi nature

• if you even care

There’s something ephemeral and magical about songs that don’t make sense. Evocative, indecipherable lyrics, a new dance of ambiguity every time to listen. Lady Mondegreen…

Which makes it so paralyzingly disappointing to learn what the song is actually about, because the correct interpretation has a gravity to it. even reading the lyrics unweaves the illusion, because as soon as your brain is primed you can never fail to parse the sound again.

It’s akin to spoilers if even watching a movie didn’t spoil you.

I’m not a TADC fan I’m just saying Zooble x Gangle is kinda on something

• imagine if they were in a better show

chat forgive me but i am opening a new text document

why does the wikipedia article for spitting cobras have a video essayist ass cadence in how it starts talking about the benefits of that behavior

Benefits [edit]
There are many reasons why an organism undergoes evolution

if you care about me youll send me posts of dragons and kobolds

what is it about naps that makes them so much more appealing than going to sleep? i suppose a night’s sleep is routine, obligatory, but a nap is succumbing, indulging to your body’s demands in spite of yourself‍ ‍‍—‍ a lurid thrill. of all the bodily functions, naptime is truly the bodice ripper

weird thing about the weevils of ambrosia is that they have every trapping of an mysterious and wise elder race that had profound magic that begot wonder and foolish atrocity only to suffer a terrible if ironic downfall long before the events of the main story’s timeline

as far as the narrative is concerned, they had their climax and denouement. they tried to build the world‍-​tree and watched it be cut down by the kingslash. even if that wasn’t the end of it, centuries later the third dominion explicitly tried to exterminate them all

dead species aren’t out of character for the setting‍ ‍‍—‍ black nerve’s got plenty who aren’t around anymore. the termites, the snow scorpions, the dragonbats

and yet, the weevils are still there? they don’t even do anything anymore but frolic in their rainforest quarantine. there is seemingly no narrative purpose to this loose end, aside from dabbing on the extinction of their erstwhile oppressors (packwatch for every termite queen?)

it raises so many questions tbh but i guess weevils stay silly

an increasing number of gay thoughts about zenin maki…

for a while now, i’ve observed that there’s a funny bell curve to my social media activity. if i feel like shit, i’m not very active, i’m just lying around useless. if i feel great, then i’m busy doing stuff. i give my middest days to my strongest mutuals

anyway what’s funny is that these usually aren’t back to back, but yesterday was awful and today kinda banged. so yeah. that’s it that’s the blogpost

• what i’m saying is that the secret mission to retroactively murder hostile takeover’s pacing is proceeding apace

i’m almost done with the HT retcons and tweaks. technically, i’ve only reread half of the fic, but it’s the half where most of the changes i wanted to make were located, and i dont know if i will comb over the rest and if i’ll even make changes significant enough to keep anyone in the loop

but i’m posting what i’ve got early because god damn i need someone to see what i’ve been working on or i’ll go mad. i think i really got lost in the sauce this time yall

did a word count and i think HT has become 10k words fatter from this edit pass already, somehow???

Recent Revisions

i think some of the changes are cool but lowkey i think i’m murdering the pacing and muddling the structure

can anyone hear me. am i making sense

thunder has the whole sky in a rumble‍-​blanket rn. it’s vast and i think it’s friendly

i get comments from people claiming i’ve converting them to shipping juzi, but only a few people who’ve proven that by brainrotting about juzi with me. yall are the real ones

as fun as it is to write juzi, it hits different from reading it, so unlike a lot of my readers, i’m a lot less familiar with what it’s like to read juzi. enough that it always catches me off guard to go “oh wait. i do want to read juzi. that is a thing that i enjoy, i forgot”

sometimes i get those glimpses that make me understand why some of my fans are so rabid…

• maybe it’s arrogant
• but sometimes it feels like i’m harvesting juzi crop after a year working the fields

i guess this isn’t more than a teaser, but a conversation on discord the other day made me realize i never shared the planned arc list for corrupt combustion‍ ‍‍—‍ i never even saved it! so i had to remember/regenerate it

but the new plan divides into something like five or six parts

0. Corrupt Combustion Zero (Flash Memory)

1. CC1: Compression & Extraction

   1. The Fearsome Rootkit Incident
   2. Warpath to the Corpse Spire
   3. Introject Prisoner and Renegade Double

2. CC2: Deadlocked & Thrashing

   1. The Advanced Placement Exams
   2. Blackhat Suppression Mission
   3. The Uzi Retrieval Arc

3. CC3: CVE 3071‍-​0606 (“Citadel”)

   1. The Nameless and the Dead
   2. False Power, False Demise
   3. The Citadel Incident

4. CC4: Hell’s Sorting Algorithm

   1. Poisoned Chalice, Parched Throat
   2. A Reckoning Withheld
   3. Dead Store Read

5. CC5: Exit Code Zero

   1. Nightshade and Hidden Inventory
   2. Decisive Battle in the Uninhabited, Zombie‍-​Infested Ruins of Citadel‍-​3
   3. The Remote Host Protocol

was searching a general tag on ao3 and got jumpscared by my own fic >.>

anyway this is how i discovered that HT now has 700 kudos

how’d that happen

scrolling your dash till you reach yesterday’s posts is akin to reaching bonfire

• bonfires are the 2020s version of “fills you with determintion”

last night, or maybe it was when i woke up early this morning, i had a good idea for a post

where the hell did it go

an opaque heart breaks invisibly

should i post that juzi one shot to ao3. feels like it’s not really up to par but idk. maybe some day i’ll polish it somehow

• maybe i could make a oneshot compilation fic
• in case i ever end up writing others

i bring a sort of i’m worthless and unloved vibe to the group chat that the people who care about me dont really like

you ever watch normal people converse in ways you could never and you’re just like damn i wasn’t cut out to exist was i

• they’re autistic too so it’s not even that
• i’m just bad at the whole
• everything

i wonder how many people have browsed my site long enough to notice i have a discord server

• used to be more obvious i guess

yeah sure stepping on a lego sucks

moth@lamplight:serpentsquiggles$ grep 'chapter.html' deps.mk | wc -l
134

but can you comprehend the subtle vexation of discovering a minor oversight in a template that a hundred pages depend on, so patching it means spending minutes watching half the site recompile

The Woes of Writing Markdown

it’s been a while and i’m rereading Like Shadows Chasing the Balance and god damn, why did Serial Designation D go so hard in every single line

• was rereading it to take inspiration from one very specific scene
• i always thought LSCB was underbaked and kinda mid
• but starting to think i mightve cooked with it

actually instead of juziv it’d be kinda funny to call it juvi

chat i’m in the kitchen do yall want anything