finally sitting down to read the first draft of hostile takeover, almost two years later and
(A part of her notes that corporations were a lot like artificial intelligence, ruthlessly expanding at the expense of humanity; that at least made them more sympathetic, but they were still made of humans — no thanks.)
how did this never make it into a published chapter lol
listening to Cattle Decapitation - “The Insignificants” as i edit and was suddenly struck by a vision of how it might go hard as a murder drones AMV “Slaughter us! / Forget us! / Exterminate us!” set to clips of disassemblers killing shit “We have always been the virus / It has always” been inside us set to clips of solver users
are any of the OG juzi fans still here? this isn’t at all a Hostile Takeover update, but here’s a little morsel i was prompted into digging up at the behest of someone on discord (i may have spent most of today cleaning it up) i’ve often bragged that i outlined HT from start to finish in one day, but i haven’t talked about what that original draft of the story looked like. well… here it is! Lethal Acquisition i did quote from it, once, in — but only the very beginning, which still resembles what was eventually published. immediately after that it starts to diverge, so much that i had honestly forgotten how it originally went; my active planning had long since moved to a different document, and it’s likely been a year, maybe closer to two, since i’d read the back half of this doc. (my attempts to reread it for old time’s sake sake always tend to stall out around act 2 — but it turns out that’s when it starts getting good!) so yeah. today, i finally sat down and reread it, and surprised to find… it’s actually fire? it’s all kinds of rough, but there’s are bits of dialogue and narration that shine through. i may not have followed this outline much, but it is amusing seeing ideas and phrases i’d use crop up much earlier than i expected, drawing from the same aquifier albeit a different well. (it also reminded me of what HT is really about — that J/Uzi i dynamic i had spent so long carefully building toward. it’s only present for a few short scenes in this draft, but that’s still more than i’ve ever published — and god it makes me foam at the mouth for more. forgive the self-congratulation, but god. nobody does it like me) anyway, at this point, you should view this as yet another juzi sketch, an AU like so many others of mine, which happens to share some similarities in premise to HT. i enjoyed reading it — maybe you will too
i got a bit carried away with portraying that first real conversation (seems to happen whenever i write these two talking >.>), but the real thing i wanted to imagine was the arc.
kind of funny to notice when the relationship dynamics and kinks you’re into, romantically and sexually, are so suppressed and subtextual that you could start writing a ship then decide the characters are actually platonic, even aroace, and not actually need to change much of anything
one of these days i might do it just because why not
was posting screenshots of funny tags in a chat and someone asked for a link. hadn’t read the fic, but i provided it. came back complaining that the fic wasn’t good so i was just like puts u in thisCage for reviving canary, with oxygen cylinder, made by Siebe Gorman & Co. Ltd, London. didn’t get the reference at all but was like “okay, yay” apparently just thought i was putting people in The Device for unknown purposes but it had that much trust in me…
fun thing about that ‘what if j took her time’ post is that it’s actually sort of an outtake. i had a much more coherent au premise with more compelling stakes & plot, but i ran into a roadblock where i couldnt figure out how J managed not to fumble her girl causing the whole thing to collapse into a dizzyzi polycule
sometimes i think about the fact that verdant realm botanist’s “mainline” albums are numbered
I: The Suicide Tree
II: A Rose from the Dead
III: Doom in Bloom
IV: Mandragora
VI: Flora
VIII: Selenotrope
and i didn’t think much of this at first — in between IV and VI, he released a split and two EPs, and between VI and VIII he released Collective: the Shape of He to Come; Ecosystem; and Photosynthesis. so you maybe think together those interregnal releases constitute 5 & 7
then last year he released VII: Beast of Arpocalyx
i used to get annoyed at the people i follow for blorbo tagging every little thing even when the posts are barely relevant to them if at all but i forgot that when the obsession really takes ahold of you it rumbles like a cloud above your head and there is innate joy in letting the lightning of The Character strike upon whatever it sees fit
unalivespell sigma be like: i have come to bring dunks, mogging, and the black pill for the vibe of this chat truly is brainrot! and for all the slop you see trending something must also be peak!
i think trying to be friends with me is the relationship equivalent of those bosses with a long runback full of obstacles that are manageable yet just exhausting enough that progress is possible yet ultimately unrewarding
maybe a rule of thumb, when positing a conspiracy, is to ask what the conspiracy wanted to accomplish. if there’s a list — and one goal pursued for years is a list — then ask whether it’s accomplished those things with a >80% success rate. if so, you may be imagining magical levels of competence here
the property of snack packs shared by everyone in the house where the last bit persists for weeks bc nobody wants to be the guy who eats the last of it
Amongst the ruins in this deep residing cave Steps forth a being, who is freed from his chains He looks up skyward at the early morning sky The blackened canvas greets his blinded eyes He feels a power, long-gone now returned And with a deep breath, feels desire burn The hopeless aeons have scattered like a dream
what the hell did dis pater put in midnight odyssey to get a 20 minute track get stuck in my head?
no but the real magic is it’s 20 minutes and at the end your ears are begging to hear the next track
admittedly part of why this resonates so strongly with me is the sheer we’re so back energy now that i’m making progress lately on creative projects after some deep slumps
brain hitting me with that one more refactor bro. just one more sweeping change to the core logic and we’ve got this project in the bag. just rewrite it one more time pls i prommy
it’s funny (and by funny i mean painful) how much of my latest project has gone me: so you could theoretically do this, but it’s way too much work in the general case muse: reveals the path me: …i’m gonna do it aren’t i<
sometimes i feel bad about the fact that it’s been a year since i meaningfully updated my rec list — and there’s what, 3-4x as many total murder drones fics now than when i took inventory of the fandom?
but reading md fic still inflicts immense psychic damage on me for reasons i can barely comprehend
dewfangs and dewfocals (no relation, surprisingly) give me such conflicting feelings because they’re creative solutions to problems of nonhuman anatomy and expression. but that creativity makes them defining features of their respective settings except i like dragons and insects a lot, so whenever i write them in unrelated condition, a part of me is like, give them dewfangs or give them dewpils. it’s baked into how i visualize dragons and insects pretty much
i have a post sitting in my drafts touching on the topic of how i always write uzi as the submissive one. me being me, after saying that i immediately got an idea for how to execute a story where she’s the one that takes the reins, and the rest of the post is me explaining that plotline. didn’t end up finishing it, wasn’t having a great day that day
anyway, as my thoughts drift back to that topic, the core of my issue with uzi being the one calling the shots is that, well, uzi wants to do good, which isn’t as interesting to me — much harder to plot out an uzi who’s in control and still doing fucked up shit
…anyway, all of this is build up for explaining that actually, i already have a setup for this. thus, this thought is what convinced me juzi should be endgame in corrupt combustion
at this point it’s just funny how often i’ll go “i really don’t feel like i’m X, but i also don’t feel like i’m not-X, at all” then i remember oh right we’re plural
one of the fic ideas that always cracks me up when i think about it is a vizzy+noll setup where the four of them conspire to get j and uzi together on a blind date — call that Hostile Makeover
