• me when i tell the truth

read hostile takeover, a juzi fic

juzi fanfics are pretty slim pickings. there’s some good oneshots, a couple multi chapter fics that make it work with a major AU, but if you want to see their feelings build and develop believably, you’d find almost nothing‍ ‍‍—‍ till now :3

for two months i’ve been writing Hostile Takeover, a slowburn where a mission gone wrong sees J encounter Uzi, instead of N. true love begins with mutual homicidal intent, right?

(there’s also some treats for dizzy enjoyers in a subplot ;3)

it takes work to bring these two together, but if you’re willing to stick with it, i do think this is one of the best j/uzi fics out there

check it out!

https://archiveofourown.org/works/51409288

you can also read it on my personal website: Hostile Takeover

new chapter for Hostile Takeover, my j/uzi fic :3

https://archiveofourown.org/works/51409288/chapters/134699305

in which n is fulfills a promise and j grapples with new feelings

juzi nation forgive me but i’m outlining a new fic instead of working on hostile takeover…

new essay, dissecting what it means for stories to have “fast” or “slow” pacing, and my own thoughts about why my stories are paced like they are. i wonder if this is obvious to everyone except for me

Pacing is Madness

there’s something so funny to me that i (essentially) joined the murder drones fandom during the second biggest gap between episodes.

i feel like ep7 is gonna unleash a deluge of content at a rate i’m totally unaccustomed to

• i hope at least lol
• thoughts i have while i contemplate the lack of fic updates
• tho i prolly just forgot to subscribe to several as usual
• >.>

btw progress is finally happening on the next HT chapter. the burnout was real but im cooking with fire again

really hope i dont have to split this one again >.> starting to sprawl a bit beyond initial plans

• maybe it’ll suck
• but we ball

just occurred to me to combine murder drones with the one (1) thing i can draw

• juzi
• but mainly bc im the one posting it
• if this sucks it’s bc i’m just doodling after spending the day fighting the next HT chapter
• (i’m losing)
• real snugheads are the only ones with context for this
• that means u bedlam

i might start posting about my Combustion AU on here because if i keep this to myself i’m at serious risk of actually writing it

it’s murder drones except the absolute solver shamelessly copied Jujutsu Kaisen’s homework. Nori & Yeva survive, devise an antivirus patch that prevents them from becoming Cyn’s puppets, and Beau becomes a total badass somehow?

(you might be wondering if this has anything to do with that “cyn is a voice in uzi’s head” fic idea i talked about a bit ago‍ ‍‍—‍ it does, actually. i’d say i dont know how that idea led to this, but it’s really not that surprising. if you know, you know)

sometimes you see a mutual reblog something you’ve already seen and liked so the heart button is already filled in. oppressive tbh. sometimes i wanna let them know that i like that they like it too

one of the things about the murder drones fandom is that there is just no consensus on how to write cyn. bold text? code tags? Capitalizing Every Letter? does the narration spell out her every emotion? every sentence, or once per dialogue block? is it wrapped in asterisks like a chat roleplay, or colons like a markdown emoji?

you can just open cyn’s dialogue and put whatever your heart desires, no one can stop you

• i do have Opinions ngl
• but i think attempts to write cyn are going to fry my editor brain no matter how you do it

can we talk about the new chapter of Giggle, This Is My Gift To You? that shit’s got hands.

got to be my favorite take take on a tessa‍-​cyn relationship. it doesn’t work and there’s layers to the tragedy there

think there’s something to compliment in the fact that it’s got me‍ ‍‍—‍ a transhumanist vehemently rejecting dualism, with no love of humanity nor qualms against being a robot‍ ‍‍—‍ on board with the disassociation and angst of losing your humanity.

i mean i still dont agree, but i feel ya girl

https://archiveofourown.org/works/52543831?view_full_work=true

• i remember being unsure about this fic in the first chapters
• but the new one is just so good

people always talk about leaving comments on ao3 like it’s a nice thing to do, or the best way to encourage writers to keep writing, or overall like it’s how you Do Your Part in fandom

and yeah, all those things are true, but having spent the past few months leaving enthusiastic comments on as many things as i can, i have a different perspective

you should leave comments on fics because it’s fun!

taking the time to stop and focus on what i like about a story has made me way more aware of what’s going on in stories and what i like about them. there’s bit more actual comprehension and appreciation and not just beaming content into my eyes to fill time

i like noticing cool little things in fics, or riffing on funny events. i’ve never been very good at speculating or picking apart characters, but sometimes something clicks and it rocks.

and of course it’s pretty nice when you get a response and it’s clear you’ve made another person happy

so yeah, you should leave comments for your own sake, too. it makes reading better!

the brainworms are getting out of hand yall

was relistening to a scifi concept album (Vektor‍ ‍‍—‍ Terminal Redux) and was like

what if you crossed this over with murder drones tho

• give me a sec
• i might be cooking with this

Absolute Redux

i have a reblog about owl house that tumblr has been struggling to send to for like twenty minutes now

im being silenced :/

• was scrolled pretty far down my dash in that tab so now my backlog progress is being held hostage

i’ve got that “look at this cool rock” autism. impossible for me to enjoy memes & art unless there’s someone i can share it

this axiom wages eternal war against not wanting to be annoying and drown ppl in a flood of stuff.

but there’s so much cool stuff. look at it.

it happens to writers too

sometimes the guy who’s only seen boss baby goes “i’m about to make the next boss baby”

i think the reason J is so compelling as a character for me is that of all the disassembly drones, she’s the only one who does things.

as kind and lovable as N is, he’s down to do anything. he has a job and when questioned, can muster no justification stronger than “I guess I just want to be useful”

i have respect for V’s depth and her attitude makes her plenty fun to watch, but when J’s out of the picture and she’s pleading her case to N, what does she offer? free her, and “…we’ll only kill what we need to survive. Just you and me, N.” when she’s trying to kill Uzi, what does she think this’ll accomplish? it’s just so “…that thing leaves us alone”. at best, it preserves the status quo.

but J? she doesn’t just want to feel useful, she wants to be effective. she doesn’t just want to survive or amuse herself, she pushes her squad to be the top team. which isn’t to say her goals are good, or that she’s even going about them in a smart way (canon J is kind of dumb? it’s adorable). still like. she may be misguided, but at least she’s guided.

she’s fun to read and write about because for the others, you have to put them in a situation, but J’ll make trouble on her own if you leave her alone long enough

which is also why there’s so much potential chemistry with Uzi, because Uzi is the other character who does things. the whole plot gets started because of her! if she hadn’t pulled the trigger in the pilot, you can bet the two of them would be fighting for the story’s steering wheel and it would have been glorious

does anyone know what the “Oil Is Worker Drone Blood” tag means or do we all just add it for good luck

man today is blighted. send lesbians

choosing to believe the solver is real and wielding its power to make me get shit sleep three days in row and thereby prevent me from finishing the next hostile takeover chapter

• im writhing i need to get it OUT

im doing gamedev instead of writing again. can you forgive me

you ever feel the urge to scream crackling beneath your skin but you keep it tight under your stony façade and it’s like oh yeah my trauma meter just went up a lil bit didnt it

Hostile Takeover, Chapter 13!

yeah, it’s finally time.

https://archiveofourown.org/chapters/138050287

in which uzi tries to hack her way out of the afterlife, n does his best (it’s still not enough), and there’s a girl crying beneath a pile of corpses

cryptobro who’s also a murder drones fan: bitcoin will see the moon again

they: hey man how’s it going

me, who’s been repeating the cog mentality speech[he just like me fr] word for word for in my head the last five minutes: real healthy and sustainable how about you

may i know the reason why you ship them :3?

the shallow and true answer is i just like a pair of girls who kill mercilessly :3 but i do think there’s room for a cool dynamic where v forces j to relax and lighten up, distracting her from total focus on the job (and j lets her because v is at least reliable with her quotas), meanwhile j can offer v respect and validation and understanding that she would get even from n. there’s also room for fun dynamics, like j being insecure about v killing more than her, and taunting j’s loyalty and a singleminded focus on effectiveness, meanwhile j nips at v playing with her food or breaking minor regulations (and toxic stuff, like v obviously doesnt do enough to push back against j’s abuse, and i doubt the sadistic killer persona actually makes v happy, which what j’s validation is for) …in practice though, i find it way easier to write these two as absolutely hating each other. but i guess that goes for all the best ships in MD :p

TIL if you subscribe to something on ao3 fast enough, you can get a email for the chapter you just read.

it’s amusing (and by amusing i mean i feel bad) to me that Hostile Takeover is cruel to all its main ships.

sorry, dizzy fans, your ship doesn’t get to have pagetime

sorry, envy fans, your ship doesn’t get to be happy.

sorry, juzi fans, your ship doesn’t get to interact more than one chapter out of three

• just one more arc bro
• just one more arc and j and uzi can be together
• i promise :]

i feel like if ep7 trends enough there’s a decent shot one or two of the big nerdcore artists on youtube might make a murder drones inspired song

you cant comprehend how hard i’m gonna be looping that shit if it happens. i need this timeline to manifest so bad

• it might be cynical trend chasing
• but it might be a banger also

@mchallwrites’s post about metroid reminded me i never shared this fic i devoured a little while ago.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/54081529

the fic is mainly focused on x parasites (and boy does it do interesting things with the all‍-​assimilating hivemind), but the samus pov is insanely good. she’s scarier than the monsters.

if you don’t like being human i think there’s a lot to enjoy in this fic

best part is, you dont even need to be familiar with metroid. i wasn’t.

it occurs to me that, if the aesthetic is anything to go by, episode 7 is probably gonna outdo the culty bits of Hostile Takeover by a lot. rip.

no shame in getting topped by the source material i suppose

• i’m gonna be real with you i didn’t put enough effort into them in the first place
• dont know if i regret that but i’m not proud of ’em either

after a few days working hard and making big strides on the next chapter the tank feels empty today. hate it when my brain reminds me i can’t go full throttle literally all the time

guess today might be a break day

you ever find yourself anxious at the thought of looking anxious so you spend years crafting a fine suit off armor you call confidence, hardening it against each uncertainty you face, never realizing that fear drives all your behavior until one day find you’re trapped in those scales and don’t even remember what it’s like to touch anything else?

• well?
• it’s not just me

me four months ago: j is okay i guess. i like v or uzi way more.

me now: if i see a drawing of my beloved my day improves immediately

dont write fanfiction kids

how long can a chapter get before readers riot?

• asking for a friend

i am locked in a life or death struggle with this next chapter. it’s kicking my ass. im kicking its ass. im biting and clawing. i see fear in its eyes

when the dust settles neither of us will emerge unharrowed

• who the fuck is scraeming “SPLIT IT” at my house
• show yourself coward
• i will never split it

Hostile Takeover, Chapter 14!!!

i’m so tired

https://archiveofourown.org/works/51409288/chapters/138888781

i normally put a lil description here but it’s 20k fucking words long and my brain is fried from proofreading it multiple times and writing the css styles.

i hope y’all enjoy it

hyperfocusing on finishing a big chapter before the drop has really made the wait for ep7 fly by

i should probably make a deliberate effort to get excited, i have a weird mental block when it comes to looking forward to stuff. i’ve barely even really processed the new ep as a thing that’s really happening

it’s an hour and a half later and i’m still just sitting here bouncing

fucking sublime

what do i even do now

everybody’s here and liking each other’s ep7 posts. i like to imagine it’s like we’re all in a room together vibrating after that Experience

gah i have so many writer friends with so much good work and all of them deserve attention but i am so small and only have so much time and energy

• sorry for the self‍-​congratulatory meme
• this is so embarrassing

come to think, what was alice’s end game?

was she like, trying to escape or was all the butchery just for the love of the game?

my asks are open btw. for anything, least until i have to write rules in blood.

somewhat interested in questions about writing, given how many of essays are the result of people asking me for advice. i probably have a few more good rambles up my sleeve

tbh nori and yeva have the exact same energy as the shounen protagonist with a token hetero love interest meanwhile they spend 100 pages expressing unending obsession with their same sex rival, dont read into that

• i’m not saying i ship them
• i’m saying i understand

entitiy‍-​4 asked:

Any tips on using fonts in ao3?

going to assume you’re familiar with the basics‍ ‍‍—‍ creating a new workskin at Dashboard → Skins → My Work Skins, and selecting a skin on the Edit Work page. if not, AO3 has a tutorial for this

(though skimming the tutorial, it doesn’t seem to mention the <span> tag, which is your best friend when it comes to applying styles to a bit of text within a paragraph)

now for the more specific part of this question. also, be warned i’m going to be embarrassingly technical before i actually answer your question.

this is going to sound funny, but i am by and large not a fan of manipulating fonts as a stylistic device. my personal opinion is that what font a text is displayed in should be for the user to decide, both for preference and for accessibility reasons (e.g. there’s fonts designed for dyslexic readers). i also tend to find most font changes to be a a bit goofy and immersion‍-​breaking it’s different when i do it, but i’ll explain my cope in a second

anyway, the style property you want to change to set in your work skin is font‍-​family. e.g. font‍-​family: monospace will give text a code/“typewriter” look, and on my own site i use “font‍-​family: Newsreader, serif;”. (the comma there essentially says ’if you don’t have Newsreader installed, any serif font will do)

but as mentioned, i don’t like messing with fonts, and in fact, there is no font styling as such in my fic at all. what gives?

(note: im going include mildly spoilery excerpts from my fic, Hostile Takeover)

but basically, i wrap cyn’s dialogue in <code> tags, and most browsers will make that monospaced by default, but it leaves the door open for custom userskins to add their own flair to code blocks.

for example, my site puts little boxes around them

but with all that said, i think i might be taking this question overly literally. i think it’s likely you aren’t talking specifically about just fonts, and most of the interesting things people want to replicate from my fic aren’t about what shape the letters are.

my secret weapon for styling this fic is the humble text‍-​shadow property.

what it does is simple: it creates a copy of the text, and you have four knobs to turn: you can shift it over horizontally or vertically, blur it, and of course change the color

text‍-​shadow: 1px 2px 3px red;

this gives you a copy of the text shifted to the right 1 pixels, down 2 pixels, blurred 3 pixels and colored red.

text‍-​shadow: 1px 2px 3px red, ‍-​1px ‍-​2px 3px blue;

same deal but now there’s another in the opposite directions colored blue, like a chromatic aberration. you don’t have to include the color or the blur if you dont want color or blur. now i’ll run through some real examples the “pain” effect is what you get when you stack text vertically

text‍-​shadow: 0 ‍-​3px 0px, 0 3px 0px;

the “beyond the grave” effect is text stacked horizontally

text‍-​shadow: 2px 0px 0px;

the famous “i want you destroy you” text is of course colored, and here i offer an actual tip you can predict the offsets, but the color is special

text‍-​shadow: 2px ‍-​1px 0px #da38;

full explanation here, but basically, when you write a color with four values, the first three are RGB, but the last is the opacity. i think this matters because, if the earlier part of this post didn’t make it clear, i care about readers getting a good experience no matter how they choose their custom styles (within reason, ofc)

by making the color slightly transparent, it blends with the background color, means whether you read with a light them or dark, it meets you half way

(try removing the transparency on that shade, and it’s a pretty harsh contrast on both modes‍ ‍‍—‍ though part of that might be that i made it super saturated to compensate for the transparency.)

i have some complaints about how ao3 handles css, and one of them is that it forbids you from using the very convenient filter: blur() function. to work around this, i cooked up a very “we have blur at home” solution

text‍-​shadow: 0px 0px 6px, 1px 1px 3px, ‍-​1px ‍-​1px 3px; opacity: 50%;

(it looks much better on my site, where i can filter: blur all i like)

one of the reasons this sucks is that without a doubt the biggest limiter on doing really complicated stuff with text shadows is that they don’t stack.

you’ll notice that when the “pain” effect shows up, the “blur” effect disappears.

this matters most for what is definitely the most striking and involved use of text shadows in the work: the big man himself

the basic principle here isn’t that special. the illusion of depth is accomplished by increasing blur and opacity the ‘deeper’ the text is supposed to be. the biggest trick here is that instead of the ‘px’ we’ve been using everywhere before, the offsets use ‘em’, which is a unit that relative to the font size.

but there is a nuance. you see:

text‍-​shadow: 0px 1px 0px, 0px ‍-​1px 0px, #fd64 2px 2px 2px, #fd68 2em 1em 3px, #fd65 4em 2em 5px; text‍-​shadow: #fd64 2px 2px 2px, #fd65 2em 1em 5px; text‍-​shadow: #fd6 2px 2px 5px, 0px ‍-​3px 0px, 0px 3px 0px, #fd68 2em 1em 3px;

the “translate” looks like a combination of the new effect and the pain effect, but i had to give it a special style, specifying both by hand.

if you want to layer things, it will get out of hand, and if you ever opt to revise the specific colors or values, solver help you.

also, this doesnt show up anywhere in HT (yet), but i’ve used it in the past‍ ‍‍—‍ only setting the blur of a text‍-​shadow lets you give words an ‘aura’, and it’s a neat and simple effect

(excerpt from Eifre Quest, an original work of mine from years ago. i have mixed feelings about it)

sorry if that was a long ramble or self‍-​indulgent, but hopefully something there was new or helpful. thanks for asking!

my “no, i dont want j murder drones to stab me and tear my flesh apart with her teeth” shirt is raising a lot of questions already answered by the shirt

• im fighting for my life against these allegations
• no there is no significance to me writing uzi as a sub in multiple aus
• or my friend who didnt watch the show thinking HT’s uzi was my author insert
• or my current avatar
• mini squiggles
• note: at the time my avatar was the Hostile Takeover cover art cropped on uzi

Anonymous asked:

Do you like juzi or vuzi more

i’m gonna ramble hella hard about this, sorry, but that’s the bargain you strike when you shoot an ask my way

but there’s a fun story to my answer. you see, V/Uzi was actually my first interest, and in fact when i started kicking around the idea of writing Murder Drones fanfics, the first idea i seriously tried to work out was a V/Uzi fic

(for the curious, general shape of the idea was that Uzi encounters V first, railgun wipes her memory, fails to befriend her like she did with N and has to run away. Uzi then sneaks out again and again, exploiting the railgun‍-​induced amnesia and errors to try and get through to V, leading to a kind of mutual rivalry as V tries to figure out why she keeps having gaps in her memory.

pretty sure it was going to escalate to Uzi hacking into V and potentially going dubious places. the working title for that fic was “Somnabulation”. which means sleep‍-​walking, so it would have been kind of ironic for Somnabulation to be the mind control fic and Hostile Takeover the one that spends half its wordcount in memory simulations)

but i’m rambling.

i never ultimately figured out how to make the V/Uzi fic come together into something i liked. and i didn’t have that much motivation to do so, as there are good V/Uzi fics out there, like This World Couldn’t See Us or Hold On Tight To This Time, This Place

but, as you’ll quickly discover if you search the tag now, J/Uzi fics are a lot less numerous. i did like some of what i saw there, so i didn’t have a full on “if i don’t do this, nobody will” kind of motivation driving me

but then one day, out of the blue, a single thought occurred to me, an observation, comparison, an answer to the question of “what could a relationship between these two possibly be based on?”

and then the whole fic just crystallized around that thought.

(what was thought? i’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader, or perhaps i’ll save it for a minor reveal later on in Hostile Takeover. it’s not very profound, but when it occurred to me i did have the distinct feeling that i’m not sure anyone had thought of the connection i just made.)

and i want to emphasize, when i say it crystallized, i mean it seriously came together, all at once. on October 31 last year, i jotted down the outline, initially as something to post in a discord brainstorming channel, but then i spent all evening writing more and more, and came out the other end with ten thousand words of notes and scene sketches

but anyway, all of that yapping is a long way to say

at the start i preferred V/Uzi (V was my favorite character, and J barely registered as anything but a joke to me), and i began writing Hostile Takeover essentially as a writing challenge or puzzle to prove something, or even just as a practice run for the fic i really wanted to write.

but i think my phrasing here gives the game away, doesn’t it? i think very few people would write nearly 160k words in four months out of mere intellectual curiosity

so to finally, finally answer your question, my favorite is J/Uzi and by a long shot. the relationship absolutely grew on me as i wrote it. i’d genuinely go as far as to say my hot take is that it’s actually easier to have J/Uzi make sense than V/Uzi, if you’re being truly faithful to both characters. is this because J has less character to be faithful toward? shut up.

i think the biggest factor here is that in the course of writing HT, V stopped being my favorite character. i still find her a lot of fun when i’m reading her in other fics, but writing her has just brought a lot of her flaws to the forefront, and it’s hard not to be increasingly frustrated with her character. (is this self‍-​inflicted on my part for writing a plot where V causing problems is the central driver? maybe)

but yeah, i’ve found myself so much less interested in V/Uzi as time goes on. one of my mutuals has describe vuzi as something to the effect of the blander, safer alternative to juzi, and don’t look at me i’m just misquoting him.

• i’d tag the ships i’m talking about but i dont want vuzi fans out for my blood

i never vibed with the solver color headcanons but it occurs to make that it would make for a very neat Vigor Mortis fusion, if solver colors = mana colors. (or more importantly, solver hosts = liches)

(if you haven’t read VM i’m judging you hard btw. it’s literally my favorite book series of all time and you can read it online for free. though fair warning i did little else but read it for about three or four days when i first tried it)

but anyway, it is pretty funny how the universes could click together. they’ve both got outcast protagonists awakening horrific body‍-​warping eldritch powers‍ ‍‍—‍ heck, how difference is there really between cannibalism and necromancy? (well, i guess the soul eating is also cannibalism anyway)‍ ‍‍—‍ and they scale up to world‍-​threatening potential, with their ultimate origins tracing back to humans foolishly replicating otherworldly cosmic power they didnt understand to see what would happen

hell, the eldritch god‍-​entity of both stories is distinguished by the color yellow!

• i think the mistwatcher would just eat the solver though ngl